On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.

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.