Fantasy wrote:

I was just having a look on the wikimedia donation page, and found out, that we need 10000 to 20000 USD per year... (posted on 6.Oct.03 by Eloquence: http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikimedia_Fundraising_page&... )

That number didn't come from me, as far as I know. It sounds vaguely familiar, though...

I'll answer your questions as best I can, but I should also add that I think the question is backwards to some extent. The question is not "how much money do we need?" The question is "what do we want to do, and how can we get the funds to do it?"

As we move towards 1.0 and explore the idea of going to print/cd/etc., there will likely be some *investment* needed, but that investment will (one hopes) be fully returned. Whether that investment takes place inside the Wikimedia Foundation vehicle, or separately, is something we can decide.

Let me be specific. I'd like to distribute cheaply-printed paperback copies of Wikipedia to every school in every country in Africa, in English or French as the local circumstances dictate. (I'd prefer native tongues, of course, but en and fr are more likely to be ready and useful soon.)

When the time comes, I'd like to put together a budget for that concept, and then go get funding for it, either from the general public, or from someone like Oprah Winfrey who has taken an interest in major projects of that kind. (Or possibly even governments, although as I have said, I have some real qualms about us using tax money.)

Do you see what I'm saying? There a difference between "what we need", which isn't very much, and "what Jimbo's grandiose goals will eventually require."

Would be interresting to know, how much we will (probably) spend in 2004 on:

• bandwith

I anticipate that Wikipedia will spend $0 on bandwidth in 2004. I'll continue to cover that for the foreseeable future. Traffic tripling should not be a problem for me, but if we get into 10x our current traffic levels, I'll start whining a bit.

(This is all making certain assumptions about bandwidth consumption, pricing, my financial situation otherwise, and what-not. This is not a promise, just a forecast!)

• HW

This depends, too, on the growth, and also on how strong the big machine really turns out to be.

The next thing we're going to buy is a "normal" server to act as a load balancer, I think. That's going to be very helpful in terms of getting us to our planned scalable system.

After that, I think a mail server would be a good investment.

And both of those assume that we won't first need a third webserver frontend.

• People (server admin - is this a real plan, or just an idea?)

I anticipate that Wikipedia *needs* to spend $0 on people in 2004. Again, although Jason is a paid employee, he works for Bomis, and Bomis will absorb his costs as usual.

There is an idea that we could *benefit* from paying for some server admin costs, and I think that's right.

• Domain registrations

Probably no more than $1,000.

There will likely be some expenses associated with setting up a European foundation, although we have a pro bono French attorney sort of lined up. There will be some bank fees.