Many of the things you describe here would make for a more palatable experience on an ad-based website. But you completely miss the boat by assuming that peopl

Many of the things you describe here would make for a more palatable experience on an ad-based website. But you completely miss the boat by assuming that people 'fear' advertisement, some people just really dislike it on principle. This is especially true when it comes to free culture projects who wish to be self-sustainable and perhaps even feel as if their efforts are validated a bit by the willingness of their users to support their project. Wikipedia is a huge project with tremendous social value. It is sad to me that you may be right that an advertisement would bring in 10x the revenue, because it means we're in a culture in which one expects to perpetually be in commercial relationships. This makes the user more likely to purchase a consumer good than they are to donate to a service that has been consistently offering them more value. The reason for this is that any direct donation based system is deeply damaged by the mass tendency to assume that someone else is in a better position to donate. In fact, the more valuable (and successful) a project is, the more this becomes a problem. But this problem is cultural, in an ideal world people would have a greater social responsibility without the need for assuming someone else is going to take care of important services like these. To push us in that direction, we get a giant fucking picture of Jimmy Wales to make us feel guilty and give. Personally, this has about the same negative impact on me that an advertisement would, albeit for different reasons. I think the real solution is for Wikipedia to find a better way to fund itself in a grassroots fashion. I have trouble seeing how the Wikimedia Foundation can't come up with other ways to fund themselves. They have a tremendous amount of content and data. I'd love to see them build something they can sell that would support Wikipedia's operations.