No subject

Empty screen space means something teerribly valuable that we should do 
good things with, not an excuse to clutter pages with random text.

> and I hate to say it, but my personal view is that  adwords would
> likely be more useful and relevant to many readers than the external
> links sections on many of enwiki's articles.

I'm awfully sorry you feel this way, Greg.  I don't think this is anywhere 
near the truth, myself.  Even in those rare cases where your comment here 
is appropriate, the nice thing about external links sections is that they 
improve over time, eventually becoming brilliant; when you see an ad, you 
can remove it.

> It certainly would be nice if we had a good model for operational
> sustainability, but with individual donations as a function of
> pageviews decreasing

Cost per pageview also decreases with scale.  And we've drastically cut 
back on the frequency of fundraising drives since they began, if you're 
going to use "the last two instances represent a trend" arguments.
The project as originally conceived is only becoming more scalably 
supportable by donations alone.

Please distinguish "we are looking for money because we want to grow and 
expand our mission" from "our initial project is sustainable solely on the 
strength of voluntary donations".  The latter statement remains true and 
is a tremendous statement to make to the world; one of the real gifts of 
Wikipedia as a movement and not just as a project.  Please do not hide 
that important statement about sustainability and human nature for the 
sake of winning an argument.

> and no reasonable expectation of increasing growth allowing us to reach 
> lower incremental costs of growth (we're already paying rock bottom 
> prices for bandwidth and hardware),

This should not be true.  If it is, the people who know details of our 
incremental growth costs should make them more widely available so that we 
can discuss this in specific.  We should be able to get much better rates 
on hardware and bandwidth through in-kind sponsorship if nothing else; and
are we even getting either of them at cost?

> we *will* need to get creative ... maybe if we intend to keep running at 
> all.

I did not expect FUD from you.  Do you have any specific reason to worry 
about keeping running at all?  If so, it has been over a quarter since the 
last fund drive, and we could certainly start another one to cover basic 
operations, with specific reasons and transparency.

SJ