There are plans afoot to spin off Nupedia and Wikipedia into a non-profit organization. This is by no means certain, but I think that there is
much
to recommend it.
501c3 non-profits in the U.S. are severely limited in the kinds of political speech they can make, esp. in re: various candidates and issues on the ballot. Not necessarily something I would expect wikipedia to be doing anyway, but since it ''is'' something anyone can edit, you might want to look at the possibility very carefully. Even some of the comments on various /Talk pages might be enough to cause a challenge to the 501c3 tax exemption; I am not sure; I am not a lawyer; you might want to look into visiting one. :-) Just a warning, not that the sky is falling, but that you should look into it before making a decision.
Regards,
KQ 0
I will absolutely be going over all the details with my lawyers before we finalize anything. I don't think that the restrictions on political speech are all that severe for non-profits. For example, Consumers Union is always making political statements in their Consumer Reports magazine, calling for increased regulation of this or that product category. And National Geographic magazine has editorials.
I think you're just barred from campaigning in particular ways for particular candidates. It seems unlikely that Wikipedia/Nupedia would run afoul of that kind of thing.
<political commentary> McCain's "campaign finance reform" bill is a disaster on this front, as I understand it. Nonprofit organizations like Greenpeace or the NRA would be barred from running advertisements about particular candidates for 90 days before an election. This means that voluntary organizations designed to empower individual political speech would be blocked from their primary mission. Supporters of those organizations would lose the ability to effectively make their voice known.</political commentary>
Part of the purpose of doing a nonprofit is to make it "comfortable" for other people than me to contribute money to the project. Right now, I pay all the bills, which is fine for now, but someday this will grow beyond my capacity (or, my capacity may diminish!), and I certainly don't expect that anyone will feel comfortable signing on to donate money to my for-profit company. :-) Of course, if you feel like donating money to Bomis, by all means, let me know and I'll make sure you have the right address. *wink*
But when Nupedia and Wikipedia are spun off into an entity with a non-profit charter, I think people will feel comfortable signing up for "sponsorships", in the same way that people support local theater groups by becoming patrons. You could be a "Bronze level" supporter for $X per month, a "Silver level" sponsor for $Y per month, a "Gold level" sponsor for $Z per month. All funds would go toward the improvement of the project.
That's just an idea, but I know it can't happen as long as I'm personally funding everything within a for-profit company.
koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com writes:
There are plans afoot to spin off Nupedia and Wikipedia into a non-profit organization. This is by no means certain, [...]
[...] Even some of the comments on various /Talk pages might be enough to cause a challenge to the 501c3 tax exemption; [...]
In my mind, tax exemption is not the only reason for a non-profit organisation. It's nice to have, of course.
But you're poking something that I've mulled over for some days: what about, hmm, "restricted" speech in general?
Say that someone describes how Adobe e-books work so exactly, that it is trivial for a programmer to circumvent the puny "encryption". Or the same for DVD content protection. There are also classics like descriptions of the production process of cocain or semtex[1].
I find all these interesting from a theoretical point of view. Normal encyclopedias get by with not going into too much detail, but of course WikiIsNotPaper, so if some more-or-less-anonymous contributor created a neutral article, we have no such excuse.
On the other hand, Bomis, Jimbo, or whoever can be reasonably connected with the site, would take some risk of prosecution. Is this something we just accept? Should we censor ourselves? Our peers? Leave it to the risk-takers to censor?
Footnotes: [1] BTW, I've now searched for all four terms, and found nothing concrete.
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