Wiktionary indirectly supports translation work that benefits Wikipedia, and provides a place to work on non-encyclopedic content that should not be in Wikipedia itself.

> provides a place to work on non-encyclopedic content that should not be in Wikipedia itself

I don't think I agree with you at all here, given that I grew up wanting the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Wikipedia refuses to offer it... seemingly in no small part because the founder of it makes money off of Wikia.

But, I believe regardless: if someone goes to an encyclopedia and is told "this encyclopedia needs your help: it is going to run out of money unless you donate to it", and you take that money to do something that isn't to improve that encyclopedia, that is absolutely unethical, no matter how useful it might be on its own.

> Wiktionary indirectly supports translation work that benefits Wikipedia

This alone might be somewhat fair (though I find it hard to believe, honestly); but, I still challenge whether someone who comes to the website and is shown the current banner would believe their money isn't being flitted away on things that don't benefit the resource they were using, even if it might be "more ethical" to provide better translations.

The Wikia part is a very important point.

At some point in the last 10 years Wikipedia managed to purge as much content as it could about fiction because this was Wikia's turf. There was just an order from above and overzealous mods willing to do the work, even when the content wasn't readily available.

Now the content is in a website that's closed, slow as hell, littered with ads, tracking and autoplaying video.

Maybe Wikia should be the one footing the whole bill for Wikipedia, instead of Wikipedia spending 12% of donation money on fundraisers.

They purged content about fiction because it was pointless cruft, often had no independent references, and was generally indistinguishable from undue promotion/advertising of said fiction. The increased focus on stuff that's neutral and properly verifiable seems to have been good for Wikipedia itself.

Does it "indirectly pay" translators? Or are they in fact volunteers?

Wiktionary is an incredibly useful resource

Well, get this: I agree! As someone who studies linguistics, I find Wiktionary really useful... and yet, it frankly isn't what any of the people who are donating to Wikipedia think their money is being used on, given the banner on their site. It is unethical to ask for money to run Wikipedia and then spend that money on other projects, no matter how useful they might be. If you want to do that, the banner should say "we are so glad you are getting value out of Wikipedia! don't worry: Wikipedia is safe; but... we have so many other ideas for how to improve the world, and would love you forever if you helped us achieve those dreams by donating money to our parent foundation, Wikimedia, to spend on others initiatives!". Of course, I bet almost no one would donate then.

I cannot tell what the banner shows in your region, but what I see right now in front of me says "Your donation allows billions of people to access important information on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms every day.".

That should arguably be only "other Wikimedia platforms"; no mention of Wikipedia at all, since that is more than covered already. So mentioning WP even before the others seems way different from what the GP said.

I haven't seen those surveys, (and I'm not much of a Wikipedia editor) but anecdotally, the visual editor seems to me like an obvious and long overdue direction forward.