The term "nonprofit" is rather weird. It means that the organization doesn't have shareholders, so no person owns the money that the organization doesn't spend.<p>Salaries are a common thing that nonprofits spend their money on. That table shows some very comfortable salaries, but not at all out of keeping with an organization that size. There are many larger nonprofits with much larger salaries: a number of health care systems are incorporated as nonprofits, and their executives get well into the <i>tens of millions</i>.<p>You also get organizations like MITRE, a billion-dollar federal contractor that pays million-dollar salaries to its C suite. I'm honestly not sure how that's legal. The health care firms are dubious enough.<p>Still... the idea is that they're not trying to earn a profit for shareholders. They don't pay taxes on their profits because nobody owns that money. The employees who earn 7 and 8 figure salaries, they <i>do</i> pay ordinary income tax on that money, as anybody else does.<p>I really don't know how much actual work Wikimedia does and whether it's spending that $88M well or badly. But I can say that it is in keeping with the American tax system's use of the term "nonprofit", which is not really what people expect it to be from the word alone.
I do find the wikipedia donation nags annoying (they go away if you register), and it's wild how much money they have. But Wikipedia is also one of the best things on the internet, one of the best holdovers from the golden age of the web. I don't feel bad that the people working on it are well paid. The world would be much worse without Wikipedia.
Other than having more than $350M of founds, the Wikimedia Foundation has started selling Wikipedia data to private companies (like Google) via Wikimedia Enterprise [1]. The open knowledge created by the community worldwide is now sold for profit of a few.<p>[1]: <a href="https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/" rel="nofollow">https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/</a>
ITT: People who seem to think non-profit means 100% volunteer.<p>Honestly, the information being so easily available and transparent is pretty neat. Kudos.
These people are managing one of the few things that's actually good on the Internet, better they get these salaries instead of some FAANG director.
When you donate money to charity it must eventually end up in someones pocket. Maybe it's spent on salaries, or maybe it's spent on goods and services (which will in most cases also means spending on salaries indirectly). Some mercenary is always making the money you donate. It's an inescapable fact.