Ray Saintonge wrote:
They might as well be sold, for cost recovery unless there is a plan to revive the Nupedia name for the 1.0 project. They can't be very useful just sitting in Jimbo's basement. :-)
Well, the cost was low, and that was back in the dot-com mania era when I was making the big bucks. ;-)
But you're right, they aren't doing any good where they are. The big problem with selling them is that for any _reasonable_ prices, I'd rather just give money to Wikipedia than earn money for Wikipedia by schlepping junk to the post office.
What I mean is, if I sold 100 coffee mugs at $10 apiece, that'd be $1,000. But it'd also be a huge personal problem for me, since now I've got to make labels and do postage and everything for 100 coffee mugs, plus set up a way to take orders and what not. And international sales require me to fill out customs paperwork.
I might as well have a bake sale, if you see what I mean. :-)
But if someone has a burning desire to give $1000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, but doesn't have that kind of dough, but does have the time and energy to do mailorder house work, then it could make sense for us to do this, if someone else wants to volunteer to take the goods and ship them out.
It isn't just the money, it's also the community spirit, but for community spirit, what we ought to do is just setup with a service like CafePress and use the new Wikimedia Logo.
Or, maybe we should have a vote on whether we need a separate logo for mugs and shirts. (Jimbo ducks and runs. :-)
--Jimbo