At 2004-01-02 01:47, Erik Moeller wrote:
Jaap-
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.
Fundraising is perfectly fine.
I have nothing against fundraising amongst individuals.
People will just have to get used to it.
It's not new.
We'll do it once a year and cover our operating costs that way.
Why not raise much more using advertising and pay the authors some?
As I said, I have a site with free information myself and everyday I have to choose between writing for Wikipedia for free and anonymously or on my own site 'nonymously' and getting paid for it.
There still seem to be enough people willing to be amateur writers for a couple of hours a day, but you can't expect professional writers to write for money all day and then write for free in their spare time.
Sure, Google text-ads aren't too bad, but if we can easily do without them, why bother?
It's probably less bother than having to raise money through charity drives etc.
Maybe I can even convince Jimbo to drop his silly "government money is evil" stance.
I'm against the government subsidizing anything that should be able to gain it's own money. Wikipedia is clearly something that should be able to make it's own money. People using a free encyclopedia should be willing to pay for it by ignoring ad's.
It's not that hard. On TV or radio it's much harder, because they are broadcast during a certain space in time and there is nothing other to watch or listen too. When it's just a part of your screen, you can look at another part.
What is your fundamental problem with advertising, since you seem to have one?
Advertising when applied properly is also additional information. People or companies find products or services via advertising that they otherwise might not have found. Some advertisers on my site (including myself) promote services that a lot of visitors didn't know existed and that I didn't existed before I started my site and that now provide most of my income.
(It's providing chips that aren't produced anymore or are scarce for another reason.)
Even when I answer messages in newsgroups, telling people that they can ask us to search for scarce chips for them I get thank-you letters.
You shouldn't let the excess of advertising that's on TV and radio (especially in the USA) blur your mind about this issue.
There is nothing wrong with a modest use of on-topic, non-screaming and non-misleading ads. Of course on a serious site like mine I never allowed too excessive advertising. (Which is a changing notion of course.)
Our project is so international that it should be possible to get EU funds.
But why? In heaven's name? Please consider that every euro that you would get, will have gone through several layers and eacah layer will have taken his part of the loot. First the tax-collector, then the country, then the EU, then the civil servants and their third-party adviser friends that allot the money. Also consider the centimeter thick applications you'll have to write or rather will have to have written (and those guys probably don't work on a no-cure-no-pay basis) and your project will only get money as long as it's hip and that can change anytime.
What when the big regular encyclopedia publishers find out and send their flock of lobbyists to Brussels?
This model of voluntary giving will become much more wide-spread. It's called the [[gift economy]].
Like in shareware, which never really worked on a big scale? ;-)
Greetings, Jaap