On 10/11/2008, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2008/11/10 Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com:
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.
But I think that needs to be the goal. And the fund-raising would go differently if that is the goal. It's a bit like how many universities work, and it wouldn't take that many people dying and leaving their money to the wikipedia to reach that level. It might take a few years to raise the money, but it should reach it eventually.
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.
But bandwidth and hardware costs are probably going down more quickly. the media richness should largely plateau at some point anyway.
-- geni