> Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.

No, they still pay fair wage, and I would trust it more if it pays fair wage to people spending their time on the project(including the creator).

They pay fair wages because they have enough scale where pestering for donations once a year is enough to justify their costs and then some. And even then, this forum is very famous for shitting on such a large scale not-for-profits, with many justifying their decision not to donate by seeing how much money the non-profit already has in their pockets. The only reason we even know how much money the non-profit has in its pockets is because non-profits are legally obliged to publicly disclose that, while for-profits are not (until they go public of course).

My point being that it's a mountain to climb, and just because those at the top have already climbed it doesn't translate into everyone being able to climb it. It takes a whole lot of effort and probably some public grants, but getting those public grants is a whole different skill set than actually building the thing. And you can only get a public grant after you've already created something useful, so your idea of a non-profit quickly turns into an inescable hole in your pocket that you're desperately trying to fill for at least a year or two.

This is why while our lists might vary, every single one of us can only name like 5, maybe 10 non-profits that have "made it" (however we define that success).

All that said, go set up a reocurring $2/month donation to your favourite non-profit right now. Whether you choose Wikimedia or something else, I'm sure it's well worth 10% of a monthly subscription you're already paying for an LLM or whatever. Unlike your for-profit subscriptions, if the money becomes tight you can always cancel these without losing anything.

Wages and profits are conceptually different sorts of things, even if it's sometimes hard to draw a bright line in specific cases.