[WikiEN-l] Donation banner and strongly negative reactions

[Ian Woollard]

On 10/11/2008, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/11/10 Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>:
>> I just think that the wikipedia needs to get itself to the point where
>> the interest on the money it has is enough to run the servers forever,
>> and any excess per year can be given to charity.
>
> At 5% interest you would still be needing $40-80 million +. There is
> at this time no way to do this.

But I think that needs to be the goal. And the fund-raising would go
differently if that is the goal. It's a bit like how many universities
work, and it wouldn't take that many people dying and leaving their
money to the wikipedia to reach that level. It might take a few years
to raise the money, but it should reach it eventually.

>> Right now, of course the traffic is climbing, but probably you could
>> estimate what the maximum traffic it could get would be if everyone
>> used it. Also the cost per click presumably is going down over time,
>> so you would have to allow for that as well.
>
> Nope going up wikipedia is getting more media rich.

But bandwidth and hardware costs are probably going down more quickly.
the media richness should largely plateau at some point anyway.

> --
> geni

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.