[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia struggles, Mozilla set for life?

[Anthony]

On 10/25/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
> >> By users you mean more than just the handful of active users? If the
> >> active users who are freedom fanatics forked, their place would be
> >> filled by the many contributors who don't contribute now due to the
> >> amount of bureaucracy and philosophy that gets thrown around. Users
> >> won't abandon Wikipedia because of ads, they never abandoned anyone
> >> else because of it, why start with the single most handy resource on
> >> the web.
> >
> > If there were two Wikipedias, one with ads, one without, which do you
> > think readers would go to? The only thing the original Wikipedia would
> > have going for it is brand recognition. It would take time for people
> > to learn about the ad-free version, but people would learn (possibly
> > quite quickly, since I can see the media jumping on the story).
>
> But if the Foundation has to resort to ads because there just isn't
> enough money coming in from donations and other sources to keep running
> otherwise, how is the ad-free fork going to manage any better?
>
> I don't support ads in general, but if the choice is between Wikipedia
> with ads and no Wikipedia at all I say stash a backup of the database
> somewhere safe and then go for it.
>
The choice is almost never that black and white, though.  Other than
the bandwidth, pretty much all the portions of the budget could be cut
without having "no Wikipedia at all".  It'd be slower, or less
effective, or less transparent, or less fun, or less accurate, or less
featureful, or whatever, but by the time you reach the point of "we
need money tomorrow or else the hosting company is going to turn off
power to our servers" the rest of the parts are so far destroyed that
it's already too late.