I feel like not enough people appreciate the simple fact that Wikipedia is essentially the most well-organized and complete collection of human knowledge in existence, and furthermore, it’s available to everyone who has access to the internet for free in dozens of languages.
There are tens of thousands of individuals collaborating every hour of every day to collect knowledge and share it with the rest of the world purely out of the desire to document and teach, and millions of people spending hours in the Wikipedia rabbit hole learning about subjects that they would have had no opportunity to without it.
Wikipedia is amazing. It’s the modern Library of Alexandria.
Wikipedia is one of the few online orgs that I donate to every year. Even if I can only throw a couple of bucks their way, I usually try to gift at least $20 or something.
Same here! I have a monthly donation going, and the $2 is well worth the hundreds of hours I’ve spent on it.
Don’t. I used to, until i found out that they have a ton of money and their begging and their pleading is a disingenuous emotional appeal to make people like me donate
This is a bad take to me. Them having a surplus of money is good. We want them to be operating as strongly as possible. Is it shitty to use an appeal to emotion like that? Absolutely. However, that shouldn’t mean we all stop donating to them. For some people, the shitty appeal to emotion doesn’t outweigh the importance of what wikipedia provides. Don’t donate if you don’t have it, but if someone still sees the value in what they do and it is easy for them to donate then they should do so. Personally, I put my money elsewhere, but discouraging people from donating at all is a weird stance to take.
The alternative is telling people that they shouldn’t donate until Wikipedia is nearly bankrupt. If you want Wikipedia to exist, that doesn’t sound like a wise plan.
That site has some huge yikes material on it. They basically pride themselves on being contrarian, as well.
I’d never heard that about Wikipedia before. What sorts of things are they contrarian about?
Not Wikipedia, the unherd site they linked lol
Ahh makes much more sense! Thanks!
I don’t mind contributing to a service I use pretty much daily. That seems a fair thing to do regardless of their financial state.
I’ve never donated, but I don’t mind seeing them ask. It really is all the information in history in your pocket. That’s a great thing in my book, and has never been done before ever at the scale they make possible. I see zero problems with them having money in the bank.
Should contributors be paid? I think that’s a valid question. But I’d want to know what actual contributors think on that subject.