I don't know why you're calling it grift. According to the definition a non-profit is not conducted or maintained to make a profit. I'm guessing most of us agree that Wikipedia is an asset to society and I'm hoping the people that work there get paid well. Why would I not want more people working at Wikimedia compared to something more detrimental to society like Facebook?
Because the people paid the to do (or pretend to do) useless busy-work in Wikimedia Foundation could instead be doing something productive elsewhere. The point here is that the resources in the society at large are not infinite, and if they are wasted at Wikimedia, it’s a real waste even if Wikipedia is otherwise a valuable thing worth of support.
Imagine you have a city, which has a non-profit foundation dedicated to maintaining and improving the city parks. The foundation has 20 people on payroll, $2M in annual spending on wages and materials, and is generally though to do exemplary job. In fact, people like it so much that they keep donating money to it, while the new directors of the park foundation use that money to advertise everywhere that they are starved for cash, and if every park goer donates just $10, they can meet their fundraising budget. After a few years, the revenue of the park foundation is $120M/year, they are still doing pretty good job maintaining and improving the park for $2M/year, and the rest is spent on C-level executive salaries, analyst reports, conferences, travel expenses, shovel R&D, and all kinds of stuff that the parks foundation doesn’t need to do, and which provides little benefit to the actual parks or park goers beyond the $2M they have always been spending, while enriching the employees and executives in the nominally non-profit organization. That’s roughly where the Wikimedia Foundation is today. I see this as profoundly bad state of affairs. I also find it pretty ironic that the goal of the nominally non-profit organization apparently seems to be to maximize the donations and the spend.
> compared to something more detrimental to society like Facebook?
Why would you compare it to Facebook? The choice is not better Wikimedia and Facebook. There are plenty of other projects that could use money better than either Wikimedia or Facebook.
