At this point I’m sure everyone has seen this message at one point or another. This isn’t the first time Wikipedia has run requests like this to their users and benefactors. Admittedly, I appreciate this upfront and transparent ask by the .org. It’s always a breath of fresh air, when people/institutions ask for money in honest terms. Why? Because there is always a cost associated to everything in life. Anything that’s worth a damn, or two cents, costs… well, I guess two cents HA-HA-HA. If they don’t ask for money upfront they are generating income on the backend through the exploitation of personal data, habits, and information.
Anyways, the point being, this messaging made me reminisce back to my middle school days where I spent hours upon hours at the school library because either my parents couldn’t pick me up or I didn’t feel like walking home to an empty house. So, what did I do at the library? Study? Hardly. Most of my time was spent using the school PCs running some past version of Windows XP. One of the profound and impactful discoveries I made while browsing the internet at the library was… no, it wasn’t porn. Yes, it was Wikipedia. It provided the perfect guise of academic research from which to browse all sorts of content while partaking in a side of foolishness. My friends and I had a good laugh and derived a sense of excitement from making inaccurate and humorous edits to the pages of this digital encyclopedia.
Oh yes, you didn’t forget did you? If you were a member of Wikipedia, you could actually make changes to pre-existing pages and create your own entries. We hardly glance up to the top right corner of the Wikipedia browser page anymore, but it’s still there: the log-in button. I’m curious as to how many people still log-in to their Wikipedia profiles in 2020.
The original purpose and mission of Wikipedia was to be a publicly accessible digital encyclopedia that was not curated or meddled with by central organizations, which was, and is, the case for so many of its physically printed cousins. This led to online trolls, like my group of friends, to make outlandish adjustments to various entries for the purpose of public bemusement, which in turn resulted in the blacklisting of the website by teachers across the country as an unreliable source of research. I still remember my teachers unanimously emphasizing that Wikipedia URLs would not be accepted as part of our bibliographies. It wasn’t until college that I had a professor allow Wikipedia as a source, admitting she too attained much of her supplementary knowledge from the pedia.
Wikipedia was truly a Medium before Medium. Fine, it’s not quite the same, but there are definitely parallels and overlaps. The cultish membership and avid reader/contributor-ship is truly unique to both platforms. Really, all of entries and articles on both are loosely curated by the powers that be, but are really based upon opinions and personal insights rather than solid facts. But are any facts truly solid? Medium is in a sense, at least originally, a crowdsourced conglomerate of personal and institutional journals. It’s nice to see that Medium has found a transparent financial structure to help create value to writers, readers, and the company itself. Both platforms in their own unique space and time continuum have been the source of much information that has benefited the masses. I am forever grateful for the creation, growth, and existence of both.
So… has anyone actually donated money to Wikipedia before?
