On 2/18/07, Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.com wrote:
Hi!
Have you been paying attention lately; our costs and our traffic are growing exponentially.
Not forever.
Of course not. But will they stop growing due to lack of funding, or due to the fact that the goals have been met and everyone in the world has access to the sum of all knowledge?
What percentage of the world is served by Wikipedia today? What percentage of all knowledge is in the encyclopedia? Multiply by the reciprocals, and how much would the yearly costs be?
I see from Alexa the reach is 5% of Internet users. 16.6% of the world is on the Internet. I'm going to guess Wikipedia covers 1% of what it should. That's a major lowball estimate, though.
So 1/.05/.166/.01=12,048. Will Wikimedia ever be able to raise $12 billion a year? If not, then cutting costs is mandatory in order to reach the goals. My guess is no. $12 billion a year is way too much money to be passing through a non-governmental organization like Wikimedia.
And from your own comments we're talking about a problem that's going to be very difficult to solve. I'm not saying that everyone who is doing anything related to Wikimedia needs to drop everything else and work on this. But some people need to be considering it. In other words, I think we do "benefit from the flamefests on this list every few months", though obviously not literally from those parts of the discussion which are simply flames.
Anthony