Comment by ryan_lane

Erik's estimates were not good, which is one of the many reasons he wasn't good at his job. The current staffing at Wikimedia is considerably more in-line with their needs, and their salaries are much closer to what the industry pays (but is still considerably lower). Wikimedia's salaries are much higher than $10 a year currently, which kind of shows how off he was on his estimates.

Note that any site near Wikipedia's scale has at least 2-3x more software engineers (many of them have thousands of engineers), and much larger legal teams. Support roles grow in parallel with employee size. Wikimedia's overall salary cost is quite amazing for what they maintain.