https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimed ... 2018/Final
They want $100 million over the next ten years or $10 million a year according to the latest Annual Plan:
Finally, the Foundation intends to continue to build the Wikimedia Endowment to secure the future of the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. We have made a commitment an initial campaign to raise US $100 million over ten years. The Foundation has committed to seeking US $5 million per year from external sources, and matching this funding with US $5 million from our regular annual fundraising, until our initial $100 million campaign target is met. This US $5 million was not included in the 2016-2017 budget, but will be resourced out of funds raised from the online fundraising campaigns, as we announced in December. The proposed 2017-2018 budget includes this scheduled US $5 million annual commitment to the Endowment.
$5 million are needed from the global Wikipedia community every year for the next ten years. I miss the days when Danny Wool considered even a few cents donated to be worthy of praise. The WMF has dug too deep and too greedily.
I found this old Washington Post article about the 2015 fundraising fiasco.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... ate-yours/
Note this part:
“People will come up to me during fundraising season and ask if Wikipedia’s in trouble,” said Andrew Lih, an associate professor of journalism at American University and the author of “The Wikipedia Revolution.” “I have to reassure them that not only is Wikipedia not in trouble, but that it’s making more money than ever before and is at no risk of going away.”
In the fiscal year that ended last June, WMF reported net assets in excess of $77 million — about one and a half times the amount it actually takes to fund the site for a year. On Dec. 3, 2014 — the single biggest day of last year’s fundraising campaign — the foundation pocketed enough money to power Wikipedia’s servers for 66 straight weeks.
This sort of financial situation is actually far from unusual among large nonprofits, which hope to guard against future shortfalls by amassing current reserves. But when the Wikimedia Foundation follows that model, it gets reprimanded: It grew out of the near-anarchic online community surrounding the wiki movement, and is still beholden to its ethics.
“It’s an advertisement that says ‘we will never run advertisements,’” complained Pete Forsyth, a former member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising team and a current Wikipedia consultant. “It’s an embarrassment to Wikipedia.”
I apologize for taking a huge chunk of the article out, but I think it bears comment that even Andrew Lih and Pete Forsyth, both major believers of Wikipedia, found it ridiculous how the WMF was (and still is) begging for money in such a way that it seems like the site is going away forever when it has enough revenue to survive and thrive.