--- Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/26/05, Jtkiefer jtkiefer@wordzen.net wrote:
I thought it was generally agreed upon though that rising costs on hardware could be compensated for, since users are more than willing
to
donate for hardware costs. Correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't wikimedia just adjust their donation goals to cover that and thus
cover
the cost of new hardware/repairs/upgrades, etc...?
So far, that is pretty much all we have been doing (although the foundation also wants to do much, much more than that). But buying more hardware and serving lots more people also increases overhead/administrative costs. So while the percentage that overhead takes from the budget has been in the 20-30% range, the total amount has grown in proportion to hardware and hosting costs.
Daniel made it clear, the curve for donations won't follow the curve for costs. Since our costs are growing so fast (I won't go back to all the explanations given here and elsewhere), I don't think that fundraising drives will be near enough to cover those costs.
Actually, I just said my gut feeling was that the donation curve would not
follow the cost curve forever. What is needed is a statistical assessment of the two. However, looking *only* at two fund drive data points and two traffic data points gives some reason to be optimistic.
Q3 2004 Fund Drive grand total: $44,863.95 USD September 2004 unique visitors to wikipedia.org http://wikipedia.org/: 3.2 million
Q4 2005 Fund Drive grand total: $243,930 USD September 2005 unique visitors to wikipedia.org http://wikipedia.org/: 12.8 million
So, there has been a 533% increase in donations for a 400% increase in traffic.
I know you've mentioned that this is only two data points, but let me point out an important one that's missing. How many of the people who donated in Q3 2004 also donated in Q4 2005? Are donations primarily a one-time thing for new users, or are they an ongoing thing? If the former, the biggest problems might not come until the growth slows down. Of course, at that point the need for new servers won't be as severe, but hosting costs will continue to steadily suck money out of the community.
I guess even without the growth slowing down, it's likely going to move toward people with less means to contribute. That'd be another interesting statistic, though it'd have to be approximate (we know what countries the visitors are coming from, and could look at the changing distribution by country factoring in the median income).
Throw in Moore's Law and things look even better. However, the traffic numbers are only for wikipedia.org http://wikipedia.org/ and this only tracks unique visitors; those visitors likely use Wikipedia more often today than they did last year. The other projects, esp Commons, Wiktionary and Wikinews are starting to become popular as well. So I'll tend to be pessimistic until I'm able to analyze some hard data for every one of our domains (data with consistent standards - esp for the non-wikipedia.org http://non-wikipedia.org/ domains - has been difficult to come by).
Small donations originated by fundraising drives are something we should *count* on, but not something we should *rely* on. We're not the only ones out there asking for money, and I believe that it is also our job to be looking elsewhere for hard cash.
Well, we kinda do have to rely on small donations. Small donations, not big ones or grants, make up the vast majority of our income. Relying too much on any one or select few big donors, grants or income from partnership agreements puts us in jeopardy if any one or several of them pull their funding. But the answer to that is to have *lots* of big donors, grants, and income streams from partnerships. However, I think your point was that we should not simply rely on donations in general as our sole income stream. Yep - I agree with that 100%. We also need to diversity our income in general - we can't be too reliant any one source
Not just practically, but legally. The difference between a public charity and a private foundation is whether the revenues come from a broad base of people or just a select few. Creative Commons just recently started its first fund drive, not just because they needed the money, but so that they could meet the IRS "public support test". See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5661 and http://creativecommons.org/support . I'm not sure if advertising would count as public support or not. I initially thought it would (under section 509(a)(2), if you care) but I've read some IRS rulings recently which have made me reconsider.
In our case, I would say that all editors, by spending the time they
spend providing content and making Wikimedia projects what they are, are already donating. I would not blame anyone who'd argue that they "don't have cash, but already give some time and knowledge". Except that time and knowledge, although they are indispensable, don't buy servers or cover operating costs.
I get several emails in the ORTS donation queue each week from people who either don't have cash or who want to donate in a currency that we don't accept. I tell each that their donation of time in either contributing content or telling people about Wikipedia is just as important as giving money. That Wikipedia would not exist without volunteer effort.
-- mav
This is the reason I think a more P2P based network would be such a great solution for the long-term. People wouldn't need to donate cash to cover operating "costs".
Anthony