[Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 9:17 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Certainly not large amounts of funds any time soon. If it could be
> done for $5k, I'd recommend doing it with WMF funds.

I'm pretty sure buying another server or offering a slightly higher
salary on the next job offering or just leaving the money to
accumulate interest would do considerably more to advance Wikimedia's
mission than this.

> I might also
> recommend doing it with WMF funds in 20 years when we have a massive
> endowment paying all our running costs and get billions of dollars
> donated a year.

I think there are still going to be much more useful things to spend
thousands of dollars on.  The utility of this project is virtually
zero from any perspective.

Of course, since all of Wikimedia's data is freely available, anyone
else who'd like to store it in some durable form for any sum of money
is absolutely free to do so.  Or they could give Wikimedia a directed
grant.  But it would be a waste of Wikimedia's money.