>Itβs the dishonesty of Wikipedia that bothers me. The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running. In reality they have $300m in the bank and revenue is growing every year[0]. Even Wikipedia says only 43% of donations are used for site operations[1], and that includes all of their sites, not just Wikipedia. Fully 12% of the money they collect from you is. . . used to ask you for more money[1]
I find it a little annoying for a variety of reasons when universities I've been to ask me for money, but one of the main reason that I don't donate to universities is that I don't want the money I donate to be used for advertising, and especially advertising to solicit more donations instead of actually improving the school.
Yeah ... Some days it feels as though 98% of the net has turned into a giant begging-bowl. Long-time major sites are now saying stuff like "You're reading your last free article." Yeah? Don't count on that.
Many of them are sites that have built themselves without any original reporting. Where will they scrape the content they've used to grow if their sources take the same attitude?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106982
>2022
>Itβs the dishonesty of Wikipedia that bothers me. The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running. In reality they have $300m in the bank and revenue is growing every year[0]. Even Wikipedia says only 43% of donations are used for site operations[1], and that includes all of their sites, not just Wikipedia. Fully 12% of the money they collect from you is. . . used to ask you for more money[1]