The circle goes like this:
Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!
Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!
Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!
Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!
Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!
Etc.
Or simply look at
this graph. The reserve they shoot for is a function of the spending, and the spending is a function of how much money they have.
They still want to "scale up" much more. And they can *always* justify that they need a bigger reserve next year than this year by spending more in this year. So it's always just "prudent and sensible" to ask for more money than last year, whether the money was
spent sensibly
or not.
I don't think anyone minds if they spend more, if there is a commensurate benefit to the end user, such as enhanced quality and reliability, and readers are told honestly what their donations are supposed to fund. But 1. product quality has been lacking, and 2. none of this is about "keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free" as the banner implies. The more they spend on paid staff, the smaller the proportion of their budget concerned with that actually becomes.
Just for a laugh, listen to Jimmy Wales
speaking in 2005 about hosting, server and bandwidth costs. (Yes, articles are longer today, page views are 15 times higher than in 2005, but on the other hand bandwidth has become cheaper and there are economies of scale.)
