[Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

[SlimVirgin]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 06:48, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> church.of.emacs.ml wrote:
>> However the main point of mail was to discuss how we're going to raise
>> funds without being annoying to readers, and I welcome any input from
>> WMF staff, chapters and volunteers :-)
>
> There's a fairly easy solution: raise less money. It costs about $2
> million/year to keep the Wikimedia wikis running. That gets raised fairly
> quickly (it took about five days for the 2010 fundraiser) without many
> annoying banners. :-)

I was just thinking the same when I saw this post. Can someone explain
why we need to raise so much money each year, then hire people to
raise even more, which means we need more money to pay them?

The attraction of Wikipedia -- to editors, readers, and donors -- was
that it was run on a shoestring by a bunch of volunteers, for the
benefit of other people.

Sarah