[elect_engineer]

But who would pay the 137,201 active editors? Oh, wait, they are all unpaid volunteers.

OK, who would pay the 1,149 administrators? Oh wait, they are all unpaid volunteers too.

OK, who would pay the developers? Oh, wait, the software was originally created by unpaid volunteers and it works well enough that having three developers evaluating bug fixes submitted by volunteers would be enough. There are plenty of Linux distributions and open-source projects that get by on one or two developers.

What about the 924,632,645 edits, 49,122,961 pages of all kinds and 5,978,255 articles? Oh wait, those are free to copy over along with the software that runs the encyclopedia.

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"