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There certainly can be reasonable conversations about whether the Wikimedia Foundation needs to spend $150–$200 million each year. I suspect few have had as detailed conversations about whether there is a need for such spending and fundraising, or about the tone of fundraising emails and banners, or the ultimate purposes of the spending as have Wikimedia’s very own volunteer editing community, which has a rather peculiar and at times adversarial relationship with the Wikimedia Foundation.495051 But “why does Wikipedia need more than the cost to serve a 50GB file” is not one such reasonable conversation. Nor are some of the other talking points that tend to come up in these kinds of conversations (“why does the Wikimedia Foundation pay employees six-figure salaries when they don’t even pay their editors??”k and “why do they need more money when they already have over $270 million??”52l are another two I see a lot). I personally have shared some of the concerns about the magnitude of spending by the Wikimedia Foundation in the past, and have disagreed with some of its allocations — but I’ll also note that I happily contributed money to the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this year, as I have in the past. k. Editing Wikipedia for pay is an enormously fraught topic, and the damaging incentives introduced by offering payment for edits at an organizational level would likely be ruinous. l. The Wikimedia Foundation tries to keep assets amounting to 12–18 months of expenses in reserve