Comment by cortesoft
16 hours ago
One option would have been to stay small. Keep the yearly spend down where it was in 2010, don't hire too many more people, and save all the donation money they brought in. Build that fund in the good years to pay for salaries in the lean years.
Wikimedia foundation actually have a rather large endowment¹ set up from donated funds to help sustain the organization through a hypothetical future downturn. I'm sure it wouldn't sustain the current level of spending but it would theoretically cover minimal operating expenses.
There are a lot of things to criticize about Wikipedia but lack of financial planning probably isn't top of the list.
1. https://wikimediaendowment.org/
The US government has been targeting endowments. Wikipedia is far too entrenched in a single country to survive a real attack.
>One option would have been to stay small. Keep the yearly spend down where it was in 2010
And what are the realistic chances of that actually sticking long term?
Same chance as corporations and governments keeping spending, corruption and cronyism under control long term. So, virtually zero.