You keep repeating the "by volunteer" line over and over again. They pay people to head the development of the wiki software, including paying developers and managing the project.
The same goes for them managing the huge portfolio of Wikipedia sites.
They run one of the most visited and iconic websites online today in a way that is totally unique at that level. If you want to run a smear campaign against them, in here of all places, you need to do better than "it's a community driven OSS site, and they accept donations!"
the issue is, the site itself they could run with 10% of current employees and they would have funds to run it for years without threatening donation banners each year
You've postured a lot in this thread about the number if employees Wikimedia has. So, put your money where your mouth is and defend your position. Which 90% would you cut, and why?
Perhaps they could tighten their belt a little bit, but to think that you can run a foundation with the size and scope of Wikimedia with ~30 employees is naive at best.
SE/QA/Prod/Mobile - No piece of software can see such broad use by millions without constantly evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of users, the ever-changing blend of user agent / browser software, and the ever-changing and hostile environment of the internet itself. If you think you've ever seen a complex internet-based software project simply become perfect and then need no further changes for a decade or more, you clearly don't understand software engineering.
Discovery - This is about discover-ability of the content itself, e.g. search engines both internal and external, and other related matters.
Security - Actually, a lot of people care about hacking an encyclopedia. Just on the server side they care about hacking the ~1000 servers that are servicing or operating on the private data of millions of users.
Traffic - It's a sub-set of Operations that deals specifically with the edge of the foundation's network (e.g. CDN-like things, for which they don't outsource a commercial CDN mostly for privacy reasons: spreading edge caches around the world, low-level performance optimization, SSL encryption, etc).
Cloud Services - This is where the foundation hosts virtual server resources for community volunteers to experiment with and run projects and products of their own that are relevant, e.g. "bot" software that patrols articles for likely vandalism attempts and such.
The same goes for them managing the huge portfolio of Wikipedia sites.
They run one of the most visited and iconic websites online today in a way that is totally unique at that level. If you want to run a smear campaign against them, in here of all places, you need to do better than "it's a community driven OSS site, and they accept donations!"