Good on them! It's one of the best things humanity has ever created. Hopefully they'll find a funding strategy that doesn't make them constantly feel like panhandlers. They provide uncountably huge value, yet I suspect with their current marketing, even very heavy readers rarely donate.
EDIT: Sounds like they are working on it: https://15.wikipedia.org/endowment.html
edit date correction :)
I think it should mimic tried and true real life coins. The spychological cost is managed by having limited number of different coins available. And the value of coin is small, but meaninful enough to be considered. In contrast to something infinitesimally close to zero.
Let's say I make payment of 5$ to your account with my email address in the message field. You send me 20 hashes to that address, each worth 20snt. Now I see artists webpage with "tip me" field. I paste a hash, you make the money happen. Simple enough?
Lately, I see individuals, and companies carefully crafting pages to further their agenda. It could be PR, name recognition, or inaccurate information reguarding their cause.
It could be as subtle as changing the definition of a neologism to singular, rather than plural. I ran across this recently. Someone wanted to promote their technospeck.whatever domain, but the plural was taken, so they deleted all the wiki information on the original neologism, and in turn just put, "for plural see the singular page.". Bringing in overnight credibility to their domain name.
What bothers me is the changes, or complete rewrite of certain pages are obviously done for monetary reasons, and the Editors don't seem to notice the motives behind the obvious manipulation.
I don't want to be one of those people who claims a service was better in the past, but once people realized they could use Wikipedia to as indirect/free advertising; that's when I lost interest.
I would miss Wikipedia if it collapsed. Do I have a feeling someone else might be able to do a better job? Yes! In this case, I feel the federal government could do a better job with Wikipedia? I would rather see four billion going to unemployed paid/trained Editors--instead of self-driving technology. Editors trained mainly in sniffing out manipulation of history/facts for personal/corporate gain.
In my case, I can't.
I began editing Wikipedia in 2004, and I got banned last year after leaving a message on the talk page of another user telling them not to use aggressive language when interacting with new users. The way oversight on Wikipedia works is that it's incredibly easy for someone to block you if you do something that they read as a slight towards them.
It's something you know all along if you spend any amount of time on Wikipedia. Over the years I was constantly running into people talking about things like overreach and abusive admins, but as an editor, you don't really look into those cases. When you're more interesting in creating content than getting involved, you trust that the admins are doing their jobs properly, and if they ever aren't, then the conflict resolution process will take care of them.