An alternative for Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales

Every year, we are subjected to the "personal appeal" for funding from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to keep Wikipedia alive.

This year he once again reminds us that Wikipedia is not a commercial website, and that it is community run. He then asks us to make a donation so that every person in the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

I think there is a better way to do it, because:

i) Altruism is good, but true altruists are few. The majority would want some sort of tangible payback for their altruism. Read "super freakanomics" for more information on this. (Note: The content contributors themselves have a tangible sentence or paragraph to point to, along with some influence.)

I suggest a publicly displayable donor badge system. More specifically, a badge that people can put on their blogs/websites etc that links to their wikipedia donor page, that, for a donor named "Agent Smith", would say "Agent Smith donated $100 to Wikipedia. Thank you Agent Smith." These pages should be open to search engine indexing so that when someone Googles "Agent Smith" the world knows he supports wikipedia.

ii) The charity concept does not work for some (in my case, my charity dollars for the year have already been committed, so in principle i will not do any more except for emergencies.)

Wikipedia is a great service. Sure, it is user contributed, but everyone understands that the servers and supporting infrastructure costs money. We are at the end of the day a capitalist society. There are some of us who live by the motto "please don't do me any favours. I'd rather pay for it, than do charity or leech off it for free.".

I suggest calling it a annual membership fee, for these people. Think of something to throw in for the sake of it ("email support?", "priority bandwidth?"), not that it matters.

You could stop badges/membership once the target collections are reached.