Wikipedia Begging Letters

[Black Hole]

To Jimmy Wales:

With all due respect to you and your foundation, it annoys me to keep receiving these begging letters and makes me less likely to donate again.

Please pester the people who use Wikipedia but have never donated. It should not be that difficult to display a banner on access to the web site, and suppress the banner when it is a registered donor making the access.

Best regards,

(a previous donor)

The Wikipedia begging emails say that only 1% of Wikipedia users have ever donated anything. If I had realised it would put me on their "hit list", I might not have done either!

 

[MikeSh]

Pester is a little strong - it's usually only every year or so they do this.
That said, after donating a few months ago I was a little miffed to get the latest one. But I then realised that I've changed the email address I used and the latest beg is to the previous one. I've now 'unsubscribed' that one.

 

[Black Hole]

Pester is a little strong

You think so? They're getting quite vociferous now! The latest in my inbox (today) is from "jimmy@wikipedia.org" subject "I've had enough" (not bothered to read it, marked as spam so I hope to see no more, because my one-time £5 donation is £5 more than 99% of the other users).

I see there are pop-ups any time I access Wikipedia, which I don't always realise I'm going to be because it is invariably the top Google hit when I try to look something up. It seems to me the "casual googler" is automatically steered towards Wikipedia by its very success, so it is churlish for them to complain about it.

 

[MikeSh]

Yes, there does seem to be a 'nag' at the top of the entry page a lot at present.

I think the frequency of Wikipedia being at or near the top more (I've noticed it too) may be a side effect of efforts by Google to reduce links to 'fake news' and unreliable information sources. So in that sense, yes it's due to its success. At least they aren't paying for top billing (I generally scroll down to the first non-AD entry on principle).