I have a slightly different take on the current purposes of the endowment.
When the community was discussing the setting up of an endowment several
years ago, I was one of those involved in our GLAM outreach who saw a big
opportunity. At some point the endowment would be big enough that the WMF
would be able to promise the cultural sector that Wikimedia Commons and or
WikiSource would be around for the foreseeable future.
For those of us who talk to museums, archives, libraries and anyone else in
the cultural sector who has invested in digitising content, one of the big
issues is future proofing. How can I deposit a digital copy of this
material in such a way that it is likely to survive for the use of future
generations. Whether or not an individual cultural organisation survives in
the longterm, the ability to upload a copy of their digital collection to
an institution that does have a credible plan for being around for the
foreseeable future should be a huge positive.
This is not a new issue. It wasn't a new issue over 800 years ago when
multiple copies were made of the Magna Carta and deposited with different
institutions. Four of those copies survive today. Handwritten copies on the
finest sheepskin parchment are very different things to digital copies with
an institution that has multiple servers in multiple locations, and an
endowment that should be able to fund migrating that information to
whatever the internet becomes in future centuries. But the principle is a
good one, and a role that I think the WMF could usefully step into.
If the endowment has grown to the point where the WMF could now announce
that it can be confident of financing Wikimedia Commons and WikiSource for
the foreseeable future, that doesn't mean that one penny need be tapped
from that endowment while other fundraising is healthy. A guarantee can be
issued on the understanding that it is unlikely to need to be redeemed for
some years. Hopefully in those years the endowment could grow to the point
where the guarantee could be extended to other projects such as Wikidata,
WikiVoyage, Wiktionary and Wikipedia. But there is a case for prioritising
Wikimedia Commons and WikiSource for such a guarantee, it would open more
doors in the cultural sector and attract uploads of materials that could be
used to improve Wikipedia and other projects..
I suspect that the endowment is already big enough to issue such a
commitment, if not, at the least the WMF should be able to set a target for
how big the endowment needs to be for this to be possible.
As for the more topical question of current fundraising and fundraising for
the endowment, I for one would be happy with a compromise whereby in future
donations would only be added to the endowment if they were specifically
given for the endowment, and each years fundraising would stop when it had
raised enough money to cover the following year's budgeted expenditure.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
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