On 12/5/14, 1:07 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
For me, the problem is with the combined impact of the phrase "ask our readers to help us", the word "survive" and the words "keep it online and ad-free for another year".
Yes, I've found myself in awkward discussions caused by this as well. One person I chatted to earlier this evening set up a recurring donation because he believed that these popover messages were an emergency "call to arms", so to speak. He understood the situation to be that: Wikipedia runs on a shoestring budget, and although it's managed in the past, it is teetering on the edge of being unable to pay for servers/bandwidth/sysadmin resources, to the extent where it may be at risk of having to sell ad-banner space to keep the lights on. He was not very happy when I let him know that the situation was not within several orders of magnitude of being quite so dire...
-Mark