Fundraiser with matching no less. Wikipedia doesn't need any more money, the Internet Archive is a far better use for a donation. And they don't use fake-urgency manipulation to beg for it either.
I notice their message says something like there's only a 3% chance you'll see the message - but I see 3 different versions of it almost every time I use Wikipedia. So either I should by a lotto ticket, or they're not really doing math when they cite a 3% chance of seeing the ad.
Having said that, I did donate to them this year. Every year I choose a different site I use often, or a charity that grabs my attention in time, and donate. There are so many, but each year I choose one, and give them a nice lump sum.
It makes it easier for me to contain how much I donate, but also lets me give sizeable donations just the same. I haven't donated money to archive.org, but I have donated code which they did include in one of their topical collections.
I might pay up some next year. But I never decide until it gets close to the holidays, end of year when I have money set aside for exactly that purpose.
Around Y2K someone was stealing content from my site. I sent a takedown notice and they told me I had no proof. So I used WayBack Machine, which was newish at the time, to show when it appeared on my site, and when it appeared on theirs. I was able to pinpoint within a week when they had stolen the text, because at the time it was being updated quite regularly. I asked, but didn't receive an answer, why they stole it and then took two weeks to publish it without even trying to hide their tracks.
Then I told them I'm writing a publicly accessible article about their theft, complete with the proof I just showed them, and links to the examples on their site, because hey, why not be an awesome example of plagiarism and outright theft in the wild, and how to prove it!
They took it down immediately thereafter, and never spoke to me again. I guess they didn't want the opportunity to be my example.
Governments should be too. It's probably the cheapest way to get the most justice done to "just" have things durably publicly archived, not to mention historical research, adminstrative utility and so on. An equivalent amount of other "spending on justice", e.g. by actually funding various agencies properly would cost hundreds of millions at the least. Not to mention it's an extremely transparent way to do it.
Of course, there's not much juicy pork there: even if they cared about the cause, a real government is probably more likely to throw a few billion at Iron Mountain and G4S via McKinsey to fail to get a tiny fraction of the utility.
