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

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Dori <slowpoke at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Er. Not that we'd ever do this unless *absolutely* necessary to keep us online,
but do you have *any* idea how much advertising revenue would be brought in by
an Internet top 50 website? At least a couple hundred thousand dollars a month
for something relatively unobtrusive like Google Ads. 

> I'd like to see us plateau on the Internet first, and then worry about
> expanding off-line. 

We have been waiting for this mystical plateau for years now. The slowest I
imagine we will ever grow is to just keep pace with the Internet's growth,
which, btw, is also exponential but not nearly as strongly exponential as our
current growth. So we would need to wait for the whole Internet to plateau in
growth, which is still decades in the future.  We can't wait for that.

> 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.

There is no reason why we can't do both in parallel. One will benefit the
other.
 
> 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. 

Er - we will need to spend at least $2M next year and a lot more the year after
that if our growth curve holds. See my email about our *exponentially* growing
costs. 

> 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).

Dramatic increases in readership, not feature creep, is what is driving
hardware cost increases. Again, see my other email.

-- mav


		
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