Our exponentially increasing costs (was Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership)

[Jimmy Wales]

Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Anthony makes a good point.  Hardware does break down over time, and has
> to be replaced.  Even more likely is that it will become obsolete before
> it breaks down.
> The projections of increased costs that you talk about are fine as far
> as they go, but this has all been in a period of rapid growth.  Sound
> accounting practice requires that we be prepared for the evebtual plateay.

Yes.  Estimates of what our costs next year vary widely, and in no small
part because it isn't possible for anyone to have a firm estimate of
what our traffic will be like next year.

There will come a time when our traffic will "plateau", but if you look
at overall internet usage figures, traffic trends, trends in media
coverage, trends in name awareness, etc., I take no particular comfort
in pessimism.

I think we can easily forecast at least two more doublings.

I've never even been on Oprah, if you see what I mean.  We've completely
saturated the awareness of the tech early adopters, but there is a huge
huge group of people beyond that who simply haven't heard of Wikipedia.

I was at a children's Halloween party the other day and a woman told me
that she had heard that I do some kind of internet encyclopedia stuff.
She didn't know anything about it.  She was excited (or, polite :-)) at
my description and promised to check it out.

They are still out there, everywhere, billions of people who have never
heard of Wikipedia.

--Jimbo