After spending countless hours as a Wikipedia contributor only to find my work blocked, censored, and removed due (rather obviously) to political activism on the part of other editors and Wikipedia itself, I will never donate money to them.
Even outside of the creeping bias that's overtaken Wikipedia, it always functioned on the charity of writers who created and edited its content without any expectation of remuneration; I think they have a lot of nerve asking us for money as well.
Personally I find many things to admire in Wikipedia. The contributions of the many dedicated volunteers is one. The simple yet efficient system design and layout is another. But all these things require no to little financial resources. Something the Wikimedia Foundation seems to be compensating for by creating ever more fanciful outreach projects. Robert Michel's Iron law of oligarchy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy - a link to Wikipedia, naturally) inevitably comes to mind.
Wikipedia is an uneven resource. For the hard sciences it's excellent; for locations it's trustworthy; for softer sciences it's spotty; for anything even remotely political it is reprehensible.
After spending countless hours as a Wikipedia contributor only to find my work blocked, censored, and removed due (rather obviously) to political activism on the part of other editors and Wikipedia itself, I will never donate money to them.
Even outside of the creeping bias that's overtaken Wikipedia, it always functioned on the charity of writers who created and edited its content without any expectation of remuneration; I think they have a lot of nerve asking us for money as well.
Personally I find many things to admire in Wikipedia. The contributions of the many dedicated volunteers is one. The simple yet efficient system design and layout is another. But all these things require no to little financial resources. Something the Wikimedia Foundation seems to be compensating for by creating ever more fanciful outreach projects. Robert Michel's Iron law of oligarchy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy - a link to Wikipedia, naturally) inevitably comes to mind.
Wikipedia is an uneven resource. For the hard sciences it's excellent; for locations it's trustworthy; for softer sciences it's spotty; for anything even remotely political it is reprehensible.