Tim Starling wrote:
Ed W wrote:
If many people feel as strongly as you, then perhaps there is scope for a wiki "bounties" page where people can offer to pay for development? Seems that hard physical "beer tokens" are a better form of vote than electronic ones anyway...
So if Wikipedians aren't interested in working on the various other projects of the foundation, you think we should just use money donated by Wikipedia readers to pay for them instead?
-- Tim Starling
Hoi, When developers aren't interested in working on functionality for the various projects of the foundation, we should find developers that are. The motivation why a programmer does what he does is no issue. As much as it is in your right to do what you do, it should be acceptable when someone writes code for money when this gets us the functionality that is lacking.
Money can be donated for many reasons. Money can come from many sources. Kennisnet pays for the Wikidata development and Ultimate Wiktionary as its first project. It is morally wrong to deny the people who donate money to the Wikimedia Foundation the right to earmark money for projects that they want to donate money to. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Donations:Putting_your_money_where_your_mouth... describes a scheme that explains how this can be done.
It is up to the board to decide how and where we spend money. We know that in Togo and Ossetia content is payed for. This is one way of creating content where we are weak. Suggestions have been made of creating "Wikimedia scholarships" where students work for the WMF to write content. The benefit for the student would be that he would need to work only 20 hours a week in stead of 30 hours. The bottom line is that spending money on these things is one way of achieving our objectives. We can get a lot of money from the public if we are clever and thrifty in the way we spend this money.
When money should only be used for hardware, we do not need to ask for money as there are plenty of organisations that are willing to donate hosting and bandwith to the WMF. So get the KNAMS "vandale" server to host a database because this is one way of saving us a lot of money because it will allow us to use all this free hosting.
Thanks, GerardM