[_def]

Keep in mind that the community aka the editors etc are all volunteers so the foundation organizes conferences, hackathons, grants etc for them (not as a compensation, but to help strengthen the community). Keeping "servers running" is only a small aspect of the whole. There's a lot of maintenance work necessary and there are also sister projects as well, like commons, wikidata, etc.

[Eostan]

They have 82 million dollars in cash and 116 million in short term investment, why do they need to run giant screen sized popup banners a few times every year begging for money and making it seem like everything will be gone tomorrow unless you donate now? They don't even run these adverts by the wiki editors themselves, just impose them from on top. They are very controversial in the wiki community and always cause pages of arguing every year.

[_def]

Because you don't have to pay and most people don't, + the reasons from my previous comment.

On the other point: Discussions are at the core the movement, and how to do fundraising "right" and how to use funds is worth discussing and gets discussed. But that it is needed in general is obvious I think. What else should be done? Let all the projects run out of funds and call it a day? That would mean the end - and today Wikipedia is more needed than ever.

[PaulHoule]

As a liberal I've always had to fight the tendency we have to not see legitimacy sinks in the name of politeness. Lately I think people are willing to listen and I'm working on ways to explain this to people who don't bellyfeel them already.

Since I was a kid I thought that the endless fundraising drives destroy the legitimacy of public television. At the bellyfeel level it is visible moneygrubbing, but at a political science level these run side by side with ads promoting the sponsorship of the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation. ADM is notably the prime beneficiary of ethanol subsidies in the U.S. that wreck the environment and make farmers go broke spending money on nitrogen fertilizers that kill off life in the ocean off the mouth of the Mississippi River.

The trouble is that small donations don't give voice, but large donations do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

I can logically justify how I feel about fundraising drives on PBS, but I feel a resonance that causes me to feel the same way for Wikipedia -- I don't know what the Archer Daniel Midlands corporation of Wikipedia is, but it probably exists. Finding out that they don't really the money confirms this feeling.

[gsf_emergency_2]

Retching from drops of com in the aguaclara of edu (or sci or org) is possibly a biological reflex by now. Debt, but 10,000 years?

Top of my idea stack is: should gov disintermediate the debt transfer?

"There be no middleman but Gov", translated for the nirvana of all

(In a sense, the Fed does exactly this, but the procedure needs to be orders of magnitude sharper/faster before it should be thought safe for bellies)