I wonder if Wikimedia can do something to help the internet archive. They are sitting on huge amounts of money and their goals are somewhat similar.
> Our reserves vary throughout the year but are generally around 1 year of revenue. The typical recommendation for stable and successful nonprofits is to have between 6 months and 2 years of reserves. (https://www.quora.com/Wikipedia-in-2015-Why-does-Wikipedia-a...)
It's only responsible for a non-profit to keep money for when people donate less or when a lot of money is needed. In fact it would be unwise to only ask for donations when you're on the verge of bankruptcy. Not to mention that no matter how efficiently you run an organization, at the size of readers served by Wikipedia you do need to meet the demand by spending more resources. I have to mention this because so many people use it as justification not to donate, "oh I don't want to fund fat cat Jimbo's private jet" or whatever, especially when the foundations is very transparent compared to other non-profits.
That being said I do agree with the sentiment since Wikipedia uses the Internet Archive heavily to access citations that have long since 404ed and they both believe in access to information. Personally as a Wikipedia editor, I use the Internet Archive daily to access websites that are no longer online and to fight linkrot. It's invaluable for the functioning of the encyclopedia, especially when reacting to dead links as opposed to pre-emptively saving sources in Webcite or Archive.is. Wikimedia does appear on the donors acknowledgement page by the way (http://archive.org/donate/donors.php), though I'm sure you meant in a more hands-on manner.
The Internet Archive uses blekko's slashtag data, which is a commercial effort founded by the ODP team -- blekko, now owned by IBM Watson.
On the other side, Wikipedia is knowledge, pure knowledge, and this is worth preserving in my opinion.
That’s why not only the very earliest Usenet posts, before Spencer started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in 1979) but even some of the posts in the 1980s are still lost. It’s too bad; today, wouldn’t more of us rather see what was being said about abortion in 1984 than sift through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have probably been long since retired? “It was perfectly reasonable from the viewpoint of stuff that we might want to use again, but a little sad from today’s viewpoint,” Spencer admits.
[1] http://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ A great read BTW.