On 07/06/05, Guaka guaka@no-log.org wrote:
We could start with a small budget in the $10-20K range, spent mostly on market research and promotion. Then we could use statistical measures of the success of that campaign to request the funding of a full-time administrative position and a continuation or scaling up of the advertising.
Spend over 10000 US$ on advertising Wikipedia to the rich, in the hope they will be moved to write articles for the poor. This might work in India, but in Africa, that seems a total waste of money to me. I might be stating this a bit too harsh, but...
I think it may be relevant at this point to remind everybody of the Firefox advertisement in the New York Times.
Specifically, a free project can have an occassional advertisement and create a lot of publicity about it. The market share Firefox gained from people seeing the advertisement is probably much less than that gained from the hundreds of articles about it in newspapers and news sites.
I do not mean that this would be beneficial for the aim of the campaign (to encourage editing in minority language) but that it could generate a large amount of publicity "on the side". After all, the news articles would not reach urban areas in Africa, but only be publicised in the developed world.
Incidentally, I myself felt the whole Firefox thing was a waste of time. Why donate to the New York Times?
Tomer Chachamu (15)