Not a single cent goes to the people who actually add value to Wikipedia, i.e. the contributors and admins. They are all volunteers.
The only work that Wikimedia does is keeping the servers on, which is not work for many people, certainly not more than a few.
And if you disagree with that, then where are all the top 1000 websites that are run by "a few" people?
In 2005, Wikipedia ran on $5000 with one employee and over a billion views just fine. People did, in fact, contribute to it despite money not being thrown into mud.
> And if you disagree with that, then where are all the top 1000 websites that are run by "a few" people?
Where are all the static HTTP websites that are ran by dozens of people? At most SaaS companies, keeping the lights on for the HTTP server is the least work you do.
Your view of the world seems strongly distorted by zealous belief in FAANG overstaffing.
It's not static content!
> I've ran moderately popular websites before and it's zero work most of the time.
I run a service that gets ten million requests on a bad day. There's almost always work to be done.
> Where are all the static HTTP websites that are ran by dozens of people?
Most static websites don't allow anyone to sign up for an account and mutate the content.
> At most SaaS companies, keeping the lights on for the HTTP server is the least work you do.
Most SaaS companies aren't serving a multi-terabyte mutable dataset to billions of people a month. They also aren't dealing with tens of millions of pages of user-generated content. Or a huge volume of legal requests because of all of their user-generated content.
> zealous belief in FAANG overstaffing.
Which FAANG company has only 300 employees?
Seriously, 23 billion page views per day. That's like if each of their employees oversaw a service that got 76M page views per day. That's a quarter million page views (not requests!) Per second. Half a billion pages on Wikipedia alone: that's a few million pages per employee.
> Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it?
No, it sounds like running one of the most popular websites on the Internet requires well-paid employees, benefits, and infrastructure investment. 300 employees is two orders of magnitude fewer employees than Microsoft laid off this week. 300 employees to run one of the most trafficked and useful websites ever created is a strikingly small number.
Yes, I want wikipedia to have redundancy. Yes, I want Wikipedia to be resilient against incidents. Yes, I want them to have lawyers to respond to legal issues (both founded and malicious). Yes, I want them to invest in new projects that may or may not pan out into useful services like the ones I already enjoy (it's hard to appreciate how many Wikimedia offers).
If you told me that they spend $100M each year to keep the site online and running well, I'd believe you. A third of that is surprising because it's an astoundingly small number given the sheer amount of value that they create with it, especially for me personally.