In my experience, it's the same in the UK. I think people are failing to consider the fact that while Wikipedia is enormous, the WMF is tiny. Yes, she had the title "COO", but that's because she was the only person in her department, so she had to be in charge of it. There is a big difference between the COO of a large multinational corporation and a solitary bookkeeper of a one-office charity.
But some involved in the foundation would seem to be trying to have things both ways; to expect their organization to be treated as a small private club when that suits them, and have it be treated as a huge multinational operation when *that* suits them.
You appear to be attempting to deny the point that it is in fact both
- it's not a matter of "suits them", it's a matter of which aspect is
relevant. There may be hundreds of thousands of volunteers, but it really is a vanishingly tiny charity office.
The Wikimedia Foundation is rather unique in this sense. Its revenues are a few million a year, but its market value would probably be in the billions.
In any case, I think this is irrelevant. A non-profit organization with roughly a million dollars in cash and equipment isn't "tiny". Small, maybe, but not tiny. A big mistake was made entrusting the operation of such an organization to someone without properly investigating her background. Maybe the principle of "assume good faith" is being relied on too heavily here. We are told a process is in place to make sure it doesn't happen again, but there doesn't seem to be an acknowledgment that such a big mistake was made in the first place. No one has stepped up and taken the blame, and I think there's a lot of blame to go around. I guess legal considerations make it difficult. But I also think there are some people who really don't understand how negligent they were.