On 3 July 2010 18:29, Keegan Peterzell keegan.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Hm, well, I think this gets back to David Goodman's point, one which I agree with.
Yes, the only absolute commitment the WMF has in the grand scheme of things is to provide the physical resource to host the projects. However, this all began as a side project on Bomis servers. If it had gone belly up before the Foundation was established, volunteers would have forked the content and found other hosting providers, not just tossed in the towel. I think it is fair to say that volunteers would still do this- locate and finance the resources independently. It would cause splintering, because of anticipated control issues,and all that comes with forks and the prongs each being pointy.
I guess my point is that ultimately I would rather see the WMF focus on using its resources to provide free educational materials as actively as possible and disseminating them as far as possible rather than build a war chest. If the shit were to hit the fan, volunteers would still step up.
When Bomis was hosting it, it was just a handful of servers. Volunteers wouldn't be able to fork the site and keep things going at anywhere near the level they are at now - if the WMF doesn't have the funds, neither will the community. You can't host a top 5 website on a server in your spare room.