Remember that time in feb 2005 when Wikipedia went down for several days and lost about a week of data because there was a power failure and they were too shoe strings to have proper back ups, and also had disabled a bunch of ACID features in mysql to get the last bit of performance out of mysql causing the power failure to corrupt the db, because they didn't have enough money for more servers and were desperate to try anything to get the last bit of performance out of their servers?
No? That's because it doesn't happen anymore now that WMF has a reasonable budget.
Its actually kind of ironic given i don't think WMF is particulary well managed or effective in its spending. I just think most of the criticisms of WMF spending are kind of terrible.
There are like 3 orders of magnitude of budget difference; I'm sure a happy middle ground could be found. Even going back to 2010's budget would save $160M/year and still be 17x 2005's budget.
That doesn't mean their spending money on what the people donating want. Most people seem to want to donate to keep Wikipedia running, but that is not necessarily where the money actually goes.
No? That's because it doesn't happen anymore now that WMF has a reasonable budget.