Re: [Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form NewPartnership

Anthony DiPierro wrote: No, we are not claiming that having advertising is going to cause all editors to leave, but it will be the creative ones who stick their necks out, are bold, and make things happen. In any project, company, or community for that matter, the creative ones are only about 1%, and it is often very difficult to tell just who those very creative ones are. They are the ones that make a group grow and propser instead of die and fall apart. An effort to do advertising like this is going to drive away that precious 1%, and you won't even notice that they are gone because for a short time edits will actually go up and it will appear as though everything is just fine. But the creative ones will be gone and Wikipedia will be a dying project afterward. You don't even have to believe me on this point, but it is a warning to not take the general opinions of the community for granted. It is a hard task to try and balance the wants and needs of a community of volunteers in particular, and aristiocratic governace of such communities just lead to their eventual demise. Having been driven away from other communities for other silly reasons, I don't see any reason why Wikipedia or the Wikimedia group of projects is going to be any different in this respect. Wikipedia is currently on a "bubble" of growth, but eventually that is going to burst because there are only so many people in the world who are capable of adding encyclopedic article entries and have the drive to do some basic research to put the information in. When this limit is reached, Wikipedia will mature and either collapse or turn into a stable project. Leadership principles right now are going to determine just how that is going to happen. As far as the cost of the servers is concerned, that will also be an interesting thing to see. At what point does this exponential growth on the part of adding servers to the database level out? As far as fundraising is concerned, usage growth is your friend in that as well. Wikipedia in particular has become a very valuable resource for a great many things, and if there is demand that means there are also people willing to pay for it. The trick is to find out how to get those people to chip in a couple of bucks to keep these projects going. By going the route of advertising, the few bucks will instead come from corporate sponsors rather than from readers/editors directly, but the participants will eventually be paying anyway in one way or another. I honestly don't know the solution to this, but I think we can be creative. I also fail to see why seeking advertising is an issue right now as each time we go on a fund raising drive we tend to exceed the fundraising goal very quickly, indeed with a strong tendancy to cut the fundraising drive once the monetary goal has been reached. This last fundraising drive sputtered in the end with seeming fits of starting and stopping going all over the place, and frankly confusion as to even if the Foundation needed the money at all. Consistancy on the part of the fundraising activities, and good P.R. campaigns for an "annual" fundraiser that could be announced through more conventional media outlets may also be useful. I'm just suggesting that we can be creative on how the money can be obtained for a project like this, and resorting to advertising is not necessary. It won't necessarily be easy to come up with the ideas, however. -- Robert Scott Horning