Hmm, disagree. I feel like most ads are not manipulative or damaging. Most are just informing you about the product's existence in ways that attempt to be memor

Hmm, disagree. I feel like most ads are not manipulative or damaging. Most are just informing you about the product's existence in ways that attempt to be memorable. To the extent others are manipulative they're so in predictable ways that can be easily compensated for, like telling you the product is great when maybe there are other people who disagree. For more objective claims there are truth in advertising laws that seem to work well enough. Wikipedia's tactics here have long been very scummy. They're a charity not a company, so people's guard is down due to the incorrect belief that charities don't have/care about profits. And the claims they're making aren't of the subjective type you learn to ignore in advertising - they tend to strongly create the impression that they're in dire poverty and Wikipedia might shut down if they don't raise enough money, which is just flat out untrue. Frankly, I'd rather have advertising than this situation. Advertising can be annoying but it wouldn't create a culture of dishonesty at the Wikimedia Foundation, as relying on donations has apparently done. Especially for an encyclopedia organization, honesty and trustworthyness are some of their most important assets, and every time they do this they set it on fire.