What is the cancer exactly? I have a hard time buying that spending by itself is a cancer. Ignoring all the opinion commentary and looking at only the numbers in your essay, they seem to demonstrate exactly the opposite of your conclusion. The numbers are showing support and net assets are larger and growing faster than spending. Isn't that the definition of a healthy business? Spending increases are roughly linear for a decade, perhaps even slowing slightly based on your plot, but Wikipedia usage and value has grown as it becomes a global resource.

This just my take on it from a distance, I don't know the ins and outs of the foundation or the web site, but all the commentary in your essay seems to obsess hyperbolically on separating the absolute spending numbers from any context. I'm failing to see evidence of an actual problem based on what you wrote.

In a general sense, I can completely agree with the abstract idea that spending should have transparency and a budget, that's always a good idea.

Wikipedia seems to me like it's still dramatically overperforming given its expenditures, that its value currently outweighs its costs, when you compare it to healthy for-profit websites of the same size & usage. Could all the increased spending be a symptom of the fact that Wikipedia 10 years ago was undervalued and managing by miracles to survive on a shoestring, and now that it's enormous the costs are correcting to where they should be?

Please stop with the giant disclaimer in front of every single reply and just post something like "(I am the author of the original essay)" and your response.

The confirmation link that you posted isn't formatted quite correctly but here is a link that is. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Mac...