On 2/18/07, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists(a)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