Thanks for the reply! I think I understand your arguments pretty well now, Thanks for the clarification.

On the subject of "Free as in Freedom" - I don't agree that a site is 'not free' if non-anonymous user membership is a requirement for adding content. Primarily because all sorts of bad actors would abuse that privilege. But that's not the main thrust of your argument so let's set that aside.

Your main concern, about the Wikimedia foundation "doing very little," and concerns about fairness, doesn't seem to hold much weight from my perspective. The entire point of the wiki project is to leverage subject matter experts from the public rather than curated work from in-house people. Not only is a comprehensive and current encyclopedia of Wikipedia's scale impractical to produce in-house, it's also far less valuable. The Wikimedia foundation solicits funds for additional wiki projects, site hosting, and community events. Hosting a site in the top 10 traffic list is horrifically expensive, and worth the expense. Spending their time, effort, and funding on ancillary efforts around that goal is fine with me, Even in a hypothetical situation where only 10% of the solicited funds went to site hosting and 90% went to activism around using the site, I think I'd still be fine with it, given the altruistic nature of the project.

Donations to contributors would corrupt the entire process. Contributors would have an incentive to produce content that would financially reward them. We already have plenty of sites on the internet that do that, with all of the issues with bias that come with it. We don't need more news sites, or lemmys, or substacks. We need a free place to compile information that is driven purely by the quest for truth, not money. Punditry for profit can go anywhere else. Indeed, recently the co-founder of wikipedia recently had their admin rights pulled for falsely accusing someone of the thing you're wishing you could do, which tells me that they take the idea of direct contributor remuneration very seriously.

Lastly, I'm very aware of the corruption with 501c nonprofits. Frankly, your comments across this post have been full of veiled accusations of corruption. If it was that apparent, you'd be posting links with factual evidence of mismanagement, instead of vague hand-waving about freedom, IP, financial mismanagement or the abuse of volunteers. This is the kind of FUD that would get you banned from editing on Wikipedia, to be honest.

Edit: From your own source you linked elsewhere, the CTO has a very detailed rebuttal to the idea that the Wikimedia foundation is squandering those dollars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1123763881#Comment_by_Selena_Deckelmann,_Wikimedia_Foundation

I agree that those big banner ads were eyesores, and the pleas for money are off-putting. But that's marketing, not politics.