For a top-10 Internet website it's not "bloated" at all, if anything it's still running on a shoestring budget. And the fundraising ends up supporting a huge variety of technical improvements and less known "sister" projects that are instrumental in letting the community thrive and be relevant for the foreseeable future. Sure, you could keep the existing content online for a lot less than what they're asking for, but that's not what folks are looking for when they visit the site. Keeping a thriving community going takes a whole lot of effort especially in this day and age, where a vast majority of people just use the Internet for 100% casual entertainment, not productive activity.

To be clear, I'm not hating on Wikipedia, just their (IMO) overly-strong push for donations.

The first word in my OP was "Except", and that was genuine -- I agree with the parent post, just outside of this one gripe. I definitely get value from it -- either directly through visits, or indirectly through it training LLMs I use.

And I don't mind them asking for support. I just disagree with how they ask, and how often they ask.

I feel like a simple persistent yet subtle "Support Wikipedia" link/button may be just as effective, and at the very most, a 30-pixel high banner once a year or so.

Maybe they've done tests, and maybe this is effective for them, but it feels like there are much subtler ways that may be effective enough.

I have supported sites and services much smaller than Wikipedia, with much less intrusive begging. But maybe that's not the case for others.

To repurpose Winston Churchill's quote on democracy, "Wikipedia is the worst form of encyclopaedia, apart for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.

For your own sake, get out of Xitter.

Its a widely known controversy

https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own, they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful. A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin with.

I don't think it's particularly wild - Jimmy Wales talked about the pages to do with Gaza before he locked them due to his concerns: https://nypost.com/2025/11/03/business/wikipedia-co-founder-... or https://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-gaza-genocide-locked-200068099....

There are many others though. The 'Solana_(blockchain_platform)' page is mainly a hit piece. When I used to edit Wikipedia, an admin told me that the amount of developers was not a relevant measure for a blockchain platform (!) and that 'proof of history' (using verifiable delay functions to sync clocks then creating an equivalent of Time Division Multiple Access to coordinate a distributed system) was not real (!!). At the time, the introduction to the page was mainly focused on FTX (who invested in Solana Lab's 5th round) and Melania Trump (who launched a token on the platform, amongst many more well known/more liked people and orgs that had done things on Solana, eg Def Jam, Lollapalooza, Instagram, Stripe, Visa, etc) which apparently were not relevant.

Wikipedia's cofounder Larry Sanger has a list of many more.

Citing sources to support claims? Sounds pretty "Wokipedia" to me. /s

"Bothsidesism" is a tired argument. Somehow if you don't think that one side of a debate is utter evil and the other side is as pure as the driven snow, you're engaging in "bothsidesism" if you acknowledge there are any shades of gray in the world. Which is a childish argument for anyone older than a high school sophomore.