Around the holidays, you may have noticed that Wikipedia puts a big donation form at the top of every page on the site. This has been going on for years now....View More For a site that refuses to profit from advertising, it's plausible why they would need donations to keep the site going and that's at the core of their copy, which uses a bunch of persuasion tactics as I outline in the annotations below. However, upon doing some research, it seems that they have more than enough money to operate, get plenty of outside funding & put a lot of the donated money towards "research projects" and political efforts that are vaguely classified and leave you wondering what your donation is actually used for. Here's one of the articles that although a bit older, goes more into this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/