They really don't. $16M to curate 3.5 million articles? That's 38 minutes of work per article from minimum-wage temps. That would cover one pass over the English edition alone, with nothing left to pay for hosting nor all the other languages. No, they would have to raise hundreds of millions or more to stop relying on scarce volunteer editors.
If you include the next nine Wikipedias with the most articles there are already eleven million articles to maintain. $16 million would pay for ten minutes per article per year (assuming $8 per hour which might not even be possible).
Wikimedia will actually be spending those $16 million they just raised, those are not available to pay for anything besides what has already been budgeted. They would have to raise $32 million to pay for those ten minutes.
If you still believe that paying people to maintain Wikipedia is a viable strategy, consider the wider implications. Why would anyone volunteer to work for Wikipedia if Wikimedia is willing to pay at least some people for the exact same work?
I’m willing to bet that on average an article gets more attention per year than ten minutes. Wikipedia couldn’t survive if all that volunteer work would disappear.
Why would you spend an equal amount of time on each article, that's insane?!?
...and funnily enough the root of the problem, if Wikipedia could have a rating scale instead of the binary "accepted/deleted" then everyone could be happy. In such a system you could browse only reviewed, fact-checked, vetted, editted, adminned, wp:blergh articles, and have something that looks a lot like a real encyclopedia. Or you could browse at the EVERTHING setting, and read more about obscure pokemon references than you could ever want, or you could browse at any setting inbetween and get the level you want.
It's a false dichotomy that the choice is between either a well-edited encyclopedia or un-edited fandom crap. You can have both at the same time.
