You have likely encountered them before: the banner ads on English Wikipedia that encourage you to donate. Typically, they run for about a month at the end of the year. As one of the proposed December ads puts it, “If you donate just $2.75, or whatever you can this [whatever day of the week it is], Wikipedia could keep thriving for years. The price of a cup of coffee is all we need.” Many people see the banner ads on Wikipedia as something like the site’s version of a PBS fundraising drive—a bit annoying because they distract you from your regularly scheduled wiki browsing, but not particularly painful. If you’re not interested, just scroll away.
But for many of Wikipedia’s most dedicated contributors, this year’s proposed banner ads presented something like a moral crisis. The Wikipedia editing community recently held a poll rejecting the proposed banner ads, pressuring the foundation that supports the site into drafting alternative ads with softer language. “The wiki community is challenging the Wikimedia Foundation’s right or ability to run fundraising ads on English Wikipedia,” said Lane Rasberry, a long-term Wikipedian and data scientist at the University of Virginia. “I can’t imagine the Facebook or Twitter communities organizing a protest like this, attacking hundreds of millions of dollars for the parent tech company. It’s unprecedented. Could not happen anywhere other than Wikipedia.” Over the course of a messy monthlong debate, participating Wikipedia editors protested that the proposed ads were misleading and unethical, while raising the specter of what would happen if the site’s contributors and the foundation failed to come to an agreement before the start of the annual fundraising season.
To understand what happened, it helps to know a little about wiki politics. The Wikimedia Foundation was established in 2003, two years after Wikipedia itself, as a nonprofit organization to fund the internet encyclopedia and other crowdsourced wiki projects. Since then, there has been a long-term debate about what decisions should be decided by the Wikipedia community—that is, the site’s volunteer contributors—versus the WMF and its staff.
While Wikipedia volunteers are primarily focused on producing content for the encyclopedia, the WMF is a major fundraising organization, bringing in $165 million from 13 million donations during the 2021–22 fiscal year, according to its fundraising report. According to WMF staff, about 87 percent of that funding comes from individual donations. The rest comes from major gifts and grants from philanthropic institutions, companies, and foundations, including $1.76 million in matching gifts from corporate philanthropic programs. (Disclosure: I have donated to the WMF for the past few years, though my donations have always been the small, “cup of coffee” amount. Cue the “I’m a Good Person” song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.)
The foundation makes the case that “every donation we receive is invested back into serving Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, and our free knowledge mission.” Wikipedia is among the top 10 most visited websites worldwide—and the only one run by a nonprofit organization. The internet encyclopedia is not funded by advertising, doesn’t charge a subscription fee, and does not sell user data. It’s worth underscoring that Wikipedia’s approach is heartening and relatively unique—other top websites are shamelessly exploiting user data or introducing haphazard subscription plans. In an interview, Wales characterized Wikipedia as “the opposite of Elon Musk” in that the project tends to make decisions slowly based on its long-term mission and because it uses a more community-minded approach.
The self-governing wiki community has long insisted that the WMF consult them when it comes to key decisions about how Wikipedia is managed, a process that WMF’s CEO Maryana Iskander referred to in an interview as “healthy democratic noise.”
That noise got a lot louder on Oct. 25 on a Wikipedia community discussion page called the Village Pump. That day, the Village Pump hosted a “Request for comment,” or RfC, about the proposed banner ads for the annual year-end fundraising campaign. In this monthlong debate, volunteers voiced concerns that the ads gave the false impression that W
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