I've seen many posts about cancelling financial donations to the #WikimediaFoundation, and arguments for and against doing so. I won't comment on financial donations because I've never given a cent to the Foundation, but have given hundreds of hours of volunteer time to #Wikimedia projects. That's my point here – #Wikipedia and its sister projects are built by an enormous community of volunteers. 25 years on, it is still the encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, with no one at the door checking for qualifications or memberships. You don't even need to register an account! (But there are benefits to registering, and pseudonyms are welcome.)
If you've cancelled or are thinking of cancelling a donation, you might want to consider substituting it by joining the community. Volunteering is often a win-win situation: you can give direct support to a project you care about, make new friends, and learn new skills (or practise rusty ones) in the process. On Wikipedia, I've seen autodidacts learn information literacy and research skills for free instead of undertaking years of study like me, and I see lifelong academics learning to communicate their expertise for general readers. In the last year, I've spent more time than I'd like learning to identify LLM-generated text ☹️ but I've also been mentoring new editors and seeing some of them surpassing my achievements 🙂.
I think anyone who can navigate the fediverse will have little trouble learning to edit Wikipedia. If you're interested, visit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Int… or ask me anything. (Or go to wikidata.org/wiki/Q3945 to find the Introduction page on another language Wikipedia.) If an editorial strike does go ahead, there are still talk pages, the fediverse, and other places where Wikipedians chat and organise.
