[Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership

[Dori]

On 10/23/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Dori wrote:
> > "Diversify our income source" sounds horrible to me. That's not what's
> > important.
>
> As a primary goal, not is it not what is important.  What is important
> to me is that while we're doing a fine job of serving the needs of
> people in wealthy western countries who have broadband Internet
> connections, (a) it is getting harder and harder to do that on our
> existing budget and (b) we are not doing all that we can be doing to
> help in less developed countries.  (Actually, other than the ways in
> which our ordinary work are starting to be somewhat helpful there, we
> are doing nothing at all.)
>
> >>BTW, do you have a few extra million dollars laying around to pay for servers
> >>next year?
> >
> >
> > Sure, but only if you put in some articles saying how great I am and
> > ban anyone saying otherwise.
>
> Why don't you drop the sarcasm and ask the question you're hinting at,
> point-blank.  Or make the accusation point-blank.

I did ask the question, what does charter placement mean legally? And
I didn't start with the sarcasm.

> Will the Wikimedia Foundation ever accept money to change the content of
> the articles?  Not as long as I'm alive, ok?  Anyone who thinks
> otherwise should check their premises and remember who I am and what I'm
> doing and how I spend my life.

Yes, but when you enter into a legal contract, it's not just you that
we have to worry about, it's the other party as well. I really don't
think we'll be getting much revenue from this deal to justify the
risk, and in general I don't think in the *long term* relying on
advertising will keep Wikipedia afloat.

> >>And what about the special projects we would like to fund but can't?
> >
> >
> > What projects? If we can't fund them, we can't. Do partnerships mean
> > that we'll be able to fund every project? If we put in advertising
> > (flash, popups, selling user tracking), and changed the license to be
> > restrictive I'm sure we could get in more money and fund more
> > projects. Does that mean that's the direction we should head?
>
> This is a valid question, although I think it would be more valid if it
> were asked in good faith.

It's asked in perfectly good faith, and I'm trying to keep the
conversation civil (though I may have gotten a bit excited there).
There are plenty of people who think the end goal of keeping all the
projects online is the most important thing. I don't think the end
justifies the means here, and I don't like to see the foundation start
on the slippery road to commercial reliance. A link on some random
tool page is no big deal (I originally thought it would go on the side
bar and that riled me up), but if we see no revenue come from that
will the foundation go further? And if so how much further? I'd like
to see the line clearly drawn beforehand. If it came to accepting
advertising or the projects going off-line/read-only, which way would
we go? The way the community learned of this deal from press releases
made a lot of people uneasy. I'd really also like to see the contract
posted publicly if possible. I trust the foundation, but I don't trust
the other party all that much.

> I think that we desperately need to be very very thoughtful and careful
> about all partnerships.  We have had offers of complete and total
> hosting from credible Internet companies, and I've turned it down
> because I am passionate about us maintaining our independence.  We need
> to carefully balance the needs of the users against the legitimate needs
> of the people who are not *able* to use our service because they have no
> computers (or clean drinking water), and be serious and adult about
> considering the tradeoffs carefully.

I'd like to see us plateau on the Internet first, and then worry about
expanding off-line. Off-line distributions will be a lot more
difficult and a lot less useful. On the other hand, there is no reason
why we couldn't start on Wikipedia 1.0, and I've yet to see that get
off the ground.

> I don't know of any other sensible approach.

I think continuing with large donations from companies and individuals
is the way to go. We shouldn't take wholesale offers of course. But I
don't think that we've exhausted all the donation avenues yet.
Whatever happened to the Google deal?

I can't believe that we would need to keep growing at 1-2 million
dollar hardware acquisitions every year. You can't go much higher at
some point. It would help to keep features from creeping in that
require more hardware too. I personally never liked the big use of
templates and categories. It's become a lot harder to make sense of
what's going on in an articles that use 10 internested templates (some
with if-else logic no less), and there is no need for categories when
you can just link (and besides I hate the idea of pigeon-holeing an
article into a category to begin with).

--
Dori