[Foundation-l] Answers.com stuff

[daniwo59 at aol.com]

Well, since the list is being overrun by people's comments on the 
Answers.com agreement, I may as well dive in with some thoughts of my 
own. I think I am pretty qualified to speak-after all, I actually saw 
the agreement, which is more than I can say for many of the people 
commenting on it.

But first, I want to tell you a little story about my former place of 
employment, a museum in Manhattan. Said Museum is now $17 million 
dollars in debt. It has used up its emergency fund. It has been forced 
to let people go (I was not let go, and was immediately replaced, but a 
few of my colleagues, including many more qualified than me, were).

It's part of a problem faced by most not-for-profits today. Lots of 
great ideas, and not enough money to go around. In fact, the little 
donations ($10-$500), or in the case of museums, admissions are never 
enough to cover basic operating costs.

We are now among the top 30 websites in the world. I believe that we 
are the only one that is a not-for-profit (haven't checked it recently, 
but it is a fairly safe assumption). How can we cover our operating 
costs?

Grants are one possibility, but there are plenty of people competing 
for those same grants. Besides, grants have to be sexy. And they have 
to be something we can really carry through with. And NO ONE will give 
us a substantial sum to just do whatever we want with it. The CFO of my 
old place of employment used to tell me that it was easy to find people 
to pay for some crap sculpture that no one else liked, or for marble in 
the elevators, but when it came to basic operating costs like a monthly 
cleaning bill of $40,000-forget it.

Nor are we in the position to put up a plaque, have a cocktail 
reception, and dedicate the "Stanley and Edith Rosenthal Server in 
honor of their grandson Milton's bar mitzvah." Nor do we want to.

We don't want pop up ads on our site. We don't want ad sense or Google 
ads, though I find it rather odd that one of the vocal opponents to the 
Answers.com deal admits to running a mirror of Wikipedia with Google 
ads. Along comes someone who wants to use our information, which we are 
giving away for free, and to pay us for it in the name of fair play. 
Rather than asking for ads on every page, they simply suggested a 
modest link on a single page, a tools page which most people don't go 
to. They did this out of respect for our mission and our ideals.

How are people responding? Well, someone suggested that it would be 
better to shut down Wikipedia for editing except for one hour a day. 
People are talking about drastically cutting the budget, though I can 
only wonder if they can point to anything significant in the budget 
that can be cut, or if they have even seen the budget at all. Of 
course, everyone wants the site to run faster. I would just like 
someone to tell us how we can do just that without getting significant 
funding. I would like someone to explain to me how we can realize our 
goal of providing every person in the world with an encyclopedia in a 
language that they can understand without paying for it in some way.

Danny