The foundation received crypto donations worth about $130,000 in the most recent fiscal year -- less than 0.1 percent of the foundation's revenue, which topped $150 million last year.

The editors have pitched to the foundation that it is better that the money is not collected because they are both proof-of-work and use an enormous amount of energy.'

According to one widely cited estimate, the bitcoin network consumes around 200 TWh of energy per year. That's about as much energy as is consumed by 70 million people in Thailand. And it works out to around 2,000 kWh per bitcoin transaction.

Of course, there are Wikipedia editors who have a lot of money tied up in Bitcoin and need to keep trying to talk up the value of the fake currency. Cryptocurrency critics argued that Wikimedia's de facto endorsement of cryptocurrencies may being used to push up their price.

If the foundation complies with the community's request, it wouldn't be the first organisation to stop using cryptocurrencies due to environmental concerns. Earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation announced it would stop accepting cryptocurrencies that use the energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus process. These include bitcoin and ether -- though the latter is expected to convert to a proof-of-stake model in the future.