<snip> I suspect that many of the qualms people have about the cost of salaries is that many people aren't particularly familiar with what all the staff do. We'd love to hear more about all the good work they do :) </snip>
That's a very good point, I don't want to sound patronising, but Wikipedia is going to be the first company that lots of our users and benefactors will have any experience of dealing with, or any real interest in, and many of the people looking at our accounts will simply not understand why so much is spent on particular things. People always point out that hosting packages are available for a few hundred dollars per year for example. I think there's a real need not just to account for each dollar that is spent, but the reasons behind why each dollar has to be spent. So much of what we see explaining situations is a rather defensive approach, which can be counter productive, and I know that's not anybodies fault, we often expect inquisitive users to have more of an understanding into how costly running a website is.
So, let's take the initiative and flesh out the accounts into a big explanation of what we do and how we do it, for all to see. It might even raise some extra money when people realise just what is involved in running one of the 10 most popular websites in the world.