Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel
Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel 3 days ago
I don't think there are objections to Wikipedia developing the community.
The objections are primarily around the aggressive and deceptive fundraising.
Wikipedia collects donations by essentially saying (in some years more directly, otherwise more implying) "if you don't donate Wikipedia WILL DIE", rather than "Please give us some money so we can build an even bigger community to make Wikipedia even better".
They are also making the banners incredibly obnoxious. From "donate or ask later", full-screen interstitials, to delayed popups that interrupt you after you've started reading, and with increasing frequency. During their "yearly" fundraisers (I think it's actually 2-3x a year, masked behind "local" vs. "global" campaigns) they pop them up every few days on every device you use, and now they're introducing "experimental" banners every month (again per device) so several times per month, and more frequently if they delete cookies. [1]
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Proposed_ch...
At some level this is true, but I'm also 98% sure that if you do that, you get far fewer donations. Fewer donations = less money to do good work. This means you can't provide money to support foundation projects (these are quite valuable and promote exchange of knowledge amongst Wikipedia contributors, and also onboard new people to make a better encyclopedia). Eventually not doing this leads to the pool of contributors shrinking, which leads to burnout, and eventually to a slow death spiral.