This is because of the lack of a profit motive and sane expectations on salary from the people running the Wikimedia project.

I think that starting in the 1980s, people started to expect anything involving information technology created immediately-accountable monetary value on a massive scale after seeing the fortunes of people like Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, et al. This was further boosted by the Dotcom bubble.

The fact is, a significant fraction of IT is indeed profitable, but applying the model of perpetual growth is not appropriate for all of that significant fraction, and there's the other fraction of the IT world that isn't directly profitable. More people need to realize that their work falls in the latter two fractions instead of the first.