It's always been like that. Wikipedia will be free to use regardless.
The donations are apparently to help with the bandwidth and server costs. However it doesn't cost nearly that much to do it, some of their capacity is donated for free anyway and most of the money is actually spent on "expenses" for the Wikimedia board. It's actually a huge scam.
If you want to contribute to Wikipedia, edit an article. Don't give money, it won't help the quality of the site and it's not transparent how it is spent. It's a great resource with poor management - have you seen Jimmy Wales' history? He keeps making arbitrary decisions that aren't his to make with no debate (making certain/all pages needing approved editors) and editing articles under a huge conflct of interest.
tl;dr You donating doesn't help Wikipedia's mission, improving articles with your time does
