On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Jay Litwynbrewhaha@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca wrote:
"stevertigo" stvrtg@gmail.com wrote in message
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 3:14 PM, stevertigostvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
It occurs to me that when people donate money to something, it is to some degree with an expectation that the recipient entity grows to eventually gain a certain kind of financial self-sufficiency. Is this not also the case with Wikimedia and many charitable donations to it?
I normally expect this.
Carcharoth answered that question in October or November: can't do it for reasons in 501(c) that give us tax advantages. For those tax advantages, we forfeit our ability to acquire self-sustaining amounts of investment wealth;
This is untrue. You can qualify as a publicly supported charity as long as 10% of total support/revenue comes from government funds and from public donations. (If over a third comes from government and public contributions, you're golden; but if you are clearly a publicly supported entity such as a library or educational institution, organized to 'attract new [government and public] support' you can get by with just 10%)
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p557.pdf (see p.29)
We simply need to define a basic set of features and services that will be covered entirely by a self-sustaining foundation; and can raise further government and public funds to support new projects, R&D, creative PR or outreach schemes, or a print Wikipedia 1.0 in 1,296 volumes...
SJ