[WikiEN-l] Donation banner and strongly negative reactions

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 1:52 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/11/10 Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>:
>> I personally don't like the current banner; the old one was probably
>> the right level.
>> I just think that the wikipedia needs to get itself to the point where
>> the interest on the money it has is enough to run the servers forever,
>> and any excess per year can be given to charity.
>
> At 5% interest you would still be needing $40-80 million +. There is
> at this time no way to do this.

Is thats accounting for the capital appreciation needed to offset inflation?

Desirable, but we're a long way off from that.

>> Right now, of course the traffic is climbing, but probably you could
>> estimate what the maximum traffic it could get would be if everyone
>> used it. Also the cost per click presumably is going down over time,
>> so you would have to allow for that as well.
>
> Nope going up wikipedia is getting more media rich.

…or at least we shouldn't count on cost per click going down, even
though it probably is at the moment.

On the subject of fundraising:

There is currently a lot of discussion about Obama's fundraising in
the US that I think we can learn from.  According to people involved
in the campaign one factor behind their success was the synergy
between fundraising and man-power:  Many people who donated were
drafted into the the Obama grass roots campaign and sent out knocking
on doors, registering voters, feet on the street. Given materials on
strategy and talking points to convince people to vote for Obama (and
convince them to donate). Simultaneously there was this enormous group
of time contributors who could be counted on as a continual source of
donations.

I think we're largely lacking this kind of synergy between labor
contributors and financial contributors at Wikipedia:  Many content
contributors are merely tolerant of the fundraising rather than seeing
themselves as components in its success.   Potentially a big area for
improvement.