[ancymon]

They also oppose having ads on Wikipedia. Personally I don't see much difference between banners asking for donations and ads. I understand there are "bad" ads (privacy violating or ones causing conflict of interest), but not all of them are like this. Same with cryptocurrencies - some of them are "scam", but not all of them. It's strange that Wikipedia sees world as black and white.

[throwaway290]

If you make ads a meaningful revenue stream, you will sooner or later optimize your content so that people spend more time viewing ads. Money will find a way.

[ancymon]

In this case you mean Wikipedia editors will start making their content more attractive to advertisers?

[throwaway290]

That or making articles purposefully structured so that the user has to jump around a few links and earn more ad views.

[DocTomoe]

I'd much rather them having an old-style Google Adsense-type ad somewhere than their annual, 50%-of-the-screen guilt-tripping donations ad.

[robonerd]

I couldn't disagree more. Those guilt-tripping donation ads are obnoxious, but I would much rather Wikipedia be an obnoxious beggar than sink so low as to be make themselves into corporate propagandists for hire. That would be much worse.