I missed this back in late November 2007.

There was a $20,000 donation to the Wikimedia Foundation from RetailMeNot.com.

This mysterious company was founded by the folks who brought us BugMeNot.com, an online database for people bothered by having to enter personal information on websites, just to get access to free content. BugMeNot allows you to "borrow" publicly-shared account sign-ins for sites like NYTimes.com, IMDB.com, and YouTube.com.

Guess which site "has been barred" from the BugMeNot system?

You guessed it: Wikipedia.org.

So, if you're a company that donates $20,000 to the WMF, it's okay for you to create a site that confounds the marketing efforts and site access policies of institutions like the NY Times, the Internet Movie Database (Amazon), and YouTube (Google) -- since they are evil corporate giants -- but it is decidedly not okay to use that site to confound Wikipedia's sign-in policies.

I wonder who prompts the "barring" of a site from the BugMeNot system? Does the request come from the targeted site, or is it internally decided by BugMeNot based on some set of criteria?

I dunno, it just struck me as either hypocritical or creepy. Or both.

Greg

Accounts used by multiple people get banned, and Wikipedia requires no personal information anyway. Why would BugMeNot want to provide a useless shared login?

They only ban sites which request it.

Oh, ye of little vision.

It's presumably not hard to get on BugMeNot. So an admin just gets on, tries to get a wikipedia login, and then promptly bans it.

These sites don't check your personal info. You can sign in with a rubbish name and a throwaway e-mail.

You don't need to login to read Wikipedia.