On 10 Jul 2002, at 14:06, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Imran Ghory wrote:
That way the machines running wikipedia wouldn't be under the control of one organization/company, this also has the advantage that the cost of hardware/bandwidth/etc would be distributed.
I'm not opposed to this, but from a technical point of view, it is complex to do it in a robust way. I.E., with a central URL, we don't get links to things that disappear, etc.
I didn't mean to split articles over multiple sites, but rather all the sites mirror all the content. For instance, mirror 1 would contain all the pages from the main site, but would change all non-edit links from www.wikipedia.com to www1.wikipedia.com.
As for the donations, it might be possible to bring wikipedia under the wings of an already non-profit organization which everyone trusts (maybe FSF, FSF Europe, Ibiblio, or one of the open source education groups) that way we could get tax-free donations without the problem of setting up our own non-profit.
This is possible, but we would be giving control away from our community, to another organization which might have different goals, and might not respect our ways.
We wouldn't have to surrender control, but rather use them as an umbrella org, i.e. they could collect the donations and put them under the control of a "wikipedia board".
Imran