I finally caved and gave Wikipedia a donation.
I even filled out the survey and asked them to leave me alone. How do they have money to pay someone to do the survey?
Most importantly, how did they send an acknowledging email, begging for more money, to the email address I try to keep private, free from spam for friends and family? I did not give them an email address in their damn survey.
How did you send them the money? I assume somewhere along the line you gave them your email address. If you used paypal, they got it from that.
I was pretty sure the pitch I responded to said that if I donated, they wouldn’t contact me for more money, but after 3 or 4 emails, I’ve unsubscribed from their mailings.
I figured that it was Paypal after I posted.
Bastards.
Hell, I give homeless winos money for booze on street corners, and they don’t beg me for more. 
And dammit, I left the email field on their survey blank, but they look it up on paypal.
Bastards.
I for one wouldn’t think less of them if they ran a thin, unobtrusive banner ad on the top of their page. That should be some valuable real estate.
That’s weird…I donated using PayPal and have never gotten an email from them. I also didn’t take a survey.
Perhaps they don’t follow up unless a guy takes the survey.
At least we didn’t have to look at Jimmy Wales’ mewling mug this time.
While I agree the “if everyone donated one cent, we’d be done in 15 milliseconds” is getting tiring, I appreciate their efforts to avoid ads. Advertising, no matter how unobtrusive, compromises the source; the way advertising is taking over is something to be concerned about. Having no ads makes the source cleaner. Even if it’s Wikipedia, meaning it’s pretty grimy to begin with. 
What’s also getting tired is the “keep Wikipedia online and ad-free” line.
Before this fundraiser even started, the Wikimedia Foundation had $28 million in cash and cash equivalents, and $23 million in investments, according to the financial statements from September 2014.
They spent only $2.5 million on Internet hosting that year, and it’s gotten to the point where a lot of Wikipedians are actually saying the wording of the fundraising banners is deceptive and manipulative.
Past donors being contacted by e-mail is normal, and was defended by Jimmy Wales here.
I donated to a “we promise we won’t ask you again” campaign. They then asked me again by email. Therefore, no more donations from me.
Thanks, HRIP7.
But they aren’t keeping Wikipedia ad free. What do you think a banner and now even fucking popup asking you to give money is? Just because they are non-commercial doesn’t mean it’s not an ad.
And, what’s worse, it’s spreading to people that do even worse. Archive.org pages had it all on their pages, without an X to close it. It took me a while to adblock Wikipedia, but I did it the first time on archive.org related issues. And it’s not even a popup.*
And then there’s Firefox, who beg on the page you see when you start up Firefox. Which would be fine if it weren’t the only way to resume your tabs from last time.
*And don’t get me started on popups. When did we suddenly decide we were okay with them? Even Internet Explorer blocks the old-style popups as they were that bad. Now every other site does them, and there’s seems to be no effort by anyone to stop them.