On 10 Jul 2002, at 4:46, Jimmy Wales wrote:
But I know that this can not continue indefinitely, particularly if the current situation leads to mistrust.
Maybe a good way to progress would be to alter the software so that wikipedia can be run over multiple machines (at the rate wikipedia is growing at the moment it'll need to be able to be distributed/load balanced sometime anyway), with one machine handling the editing and the others just mirroring the static content/search/stats pages.
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.
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.
Imran