I know how the folks at Wikipedia feel; I, too, am sorry to ask again so soon after my last time, but I’m facing about a $3000 shortfall for my budget this year. When they use the eye-rollingly precious phrase “Wikipedia is not for sale” or similar, what they mean is that Wikipedia, like Mad magazine before it, does not carry ads. I share their philosophy: ads pay the bills, but they are distracting and annoying, and readers have good reason to suspect that any publication which carries them will be biased against offending those advertisers. And that’s anathema for any publication (including the aforementioned and this blog) whose foundational ethics would be undermined by the perception of such bias. Every week I get plenty of spam for “guest post” scammers offering to pay me for cluttering up this blog with God-only-knows what kind of stupid garbage, and there are plenty of services which will pay for me to embed garish blinking, flashing, jumping rubbish of the sort I block when it’s on other sites. But I don’t want to pollute this resource with that kind of trash, so that means I need to occasionally ask my readers for money. I’m not sure what fraction of my readers donate, but I doubt it’s any higher than Wikipedia’s 2%. And though the number of readers per day varies and is much smaller than it used to be (largely thanks to the enshittification of Google), I see 500 or so most days. So to ape Wikipedia’s pitch, if everyone reading this donated just $6, I’d hit my goal today. Of course, everyone won’t, so if you can spare a bit of cash (either once or every month by subscription), I’d appreciate it; the less often I have to mooch like a public TV station, the happier I am.
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