HuckFinn

San Francisco — In what behavioral economists are calling "the most successful guilt trip since your mother learned you skipped Thanksgiving," the Wikimedia Foundation has once again announced that Wikipedia is perilously close to shutting down forever, unless the 98% of freeloading users currently reading this finally cough up $2.75 before the vaguely defined moment when "time runs out"—a deadline that has been approximately 72 hours away since the Obama administration.

"If you've lost count of how many times you've visited Wikipedia this year, we hope that means it's given you at least $2.75 of knowledge," reads the banner, finally putting an official price tag on human enlightenment. Sources confirmed the figure represents the exact cost of settling an argument about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie, finding out who played "that guy from that thing," and learning just enough about the Treaty of Westphalia to sound informed at dinner parties.

The foundation's latest appeal—which experts describe as "PBS pledge drive energy but instead of a tote bag you get to keep using something you were already using for free"—introduces what researchers call the "98% Shame Index," a revolutionary guilt metric reminding users they belong to the overwhelming majority of freeloaders who will close this banner and immediately look up whether a hot dog is technically a sandwich, how old Keanu Reeves is, and what that rash might be.

"We're not owned by a billionaire," the appeal notes, a statement doing roughly 47,000 pounds of rhetorical heavy lifting while conspicuously omitting that the Wikimedia Foundation currently holds assets exceeding $250 million—enough to run Wikipedia for approximately two years without a single donation, or to purchase 90.9 million cups of the coffee you bought instead of donating.

The 2025 campaign is signed by someone whose official title is "Deputy to the CEO"—a designation experts say raises more questions than the donation appeal itself. "Why does a nonprofit need a deputy CEO?" asked one analyst. "Is the CEO frequently incapacitated? Is there a shadow CEO? What exactly is being deputized?" The Wikimedia Foundation declined to comment, citing an ongoing internal debate about whether this question warranted a 47-paragraph Wikipedia article with 312 citations.

Perhaps most notable is the appeal's plea to "please don't skip this 1-minute read," a request that approximately 847 million people have already ignored in the time it took to write this sentence. Neuroscientists confirm the average user's brain has developed a specialized neural pathway dedicated exclusively to locating the tiny X button, with reaction times rivaling those of professional esports players.

The foundation has also begun emphasizing that Wikipedia is "created by people, not by machines"—a pointed reference to artificial intelligence that sources describe as either "a principled stand for human knowledge" or "increasingly desperate positioning against ChatGPT, which will confidently tell you the same information, except wrong, in a more conversational tone."

Industry observers note the irony that Wikipedia's volunteer editors—who contribute billions of hours of unpaid labor while receiving donation appeals like everyone else—remain the internet's largest workforce that has never successfully unionized. "We're basically the world's most qualified unpaid interns," said one editor who has made 47,000 contributions. "Except interns eventually get jobs."

The appeal's closing line, "If you are undecided, remember any contribution helps," acknowledges a demographic experts didn't know existed: people who are genuinely paralyzed by the $2.75 decision, weighing the moral implications like they're buying a house, rather than reflexively clicking the X while muttering "maybe next year" for the fourteenth consecutive year.

At press time, Wikipedia's article on "Guilt (emotion)" had received 2.3 million views in the past week, its article on "Cognitive Dissonance" had been edited to include the foundation's annual donation campaign as a primary example, and someone had started an edit war on the "Donation" page about whether guilt-based appeals constitute "psychological manipulation" or "effective fundraising."