... the influx of such substantial amounts of money, raised mostly through email campaigns and fundraising banners placed on Wikipedia, has completely transformed the WMF as well as its assumptions about what kind of organization it is – or should be.

In 2013 – less than a decade ago – Erik Möller (the WMF's VP of Engineeering and Product Development at the time) thought the Wikimedia mission would be sustainable on "$10M+/year". Indeed, 2010 marked the first time annual WMF expenses exceeded $10 million – three years after Wikipedia first became a global top-ten website.

Today, the WMF is an organization with around 600 staff and contractors, rising compensation for its top executives (eight of whom saw compensation for their roles increase to more than $300,000 by 2020) and annual salary costs estimated at around $200,000 for each full-time employee – more than twice as much as the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Internet Archive, for example, judging by a comparison of the most recent Form 990 for each.

However, the WMF's wealth is not reflected in its fundraising messages. This month's fundraising campaigns in India, Latin America and South Africa have been asking readers and past donors for money "to keep Wikipedia online", "to keep Wikipedia free" and to "sustain Wikipedia's independence". Yet there is clearly no lack of funding posing a risk either to Wikipedia's independence or to its continued presence online. At the same time –

Money is also changing the very nature of the movement: an increasing number of decisions are no longer made on-wiki, by a community of unpaid volunteers, but by functionaries and paid staff of the WMF and its affiliates. In days past, the contributors that built Wikipedia were only bound by a shared interest in free knowledge; money has increasingly become part of the glue that ties the movement together. And the WMF holds the purse strings, controlling the unprecedented wealth that results from their fundraising success.