At 2004-01-01 07:05, Daniel Mayer wrote:
I'm sure that the foundation will receive much more than that. I plan to start figuring out the dos and don't of grant writing later in January. This may be an area where it would make sense to hire a professional grant writer but I still want to do some research on the subject anyway. At the very least it will inform us better about what we should tell the grant writer.
However I am confident that a majority of the money we get through donations will be from individual donors, not charitable foundations. All the better as far as I am concerned (foundation money often comes with at least implied strings attached to do certain things).
I don't think Wikipedia should be build on grants and subsidies etc.
It seems that paying for the hardware and bandwidth can be done by the authors, but I don't think it should. The readers should pay for it, either directly or by having to lookat/ignore advertisements.
I also donated $20 to Wikipedia some days ago, but when I thought some more about it later, I started to see a strange irony:
I make my money with a 'Wikipedia kind-of' free information site about chips and other electronics:
And I make that money by selling ad-space on the site.
It's quite ironic (or even 'hypocrital'?) to keep Wikipedia free of advertisements by having it sponsored by a site that makes it's money from selling advertising space itself.
I think that Wikipedia should reconsider putting advertising on it's pages. (Perhaps only on pages about popular subjects for example.)
I make $180..$250 per month from Google's Adwords and those ad's are half-way pages on spots that I otherwise would have trouble to sell to individual advertisers, so Wikipedia should be able to do much better.
For the time being Wikipedia should have enough money but I think that this anti-advertising attitude should be reconsidered, because there is nothing against modest, on-topic advertising. I never got a complaint (but in my information-intensive field on-topic ad's are usually considered to be extra information).
Why not at least set up a test, for example on all the Britney Spears and Lord of the Rings pages and such?
Greetings, Jaap