[Foundation-l] Mission/Vision Statement

[Robert Scott Horning]

Ray Saintonge wrote:

>Our Board needs to be fully aware of where the economics of the Web are 
>going in the next few years.  It would be nice to base our planning on 
>the real per capita costs of the internet stripped of content production 
>costs.
>  
>

I'm curious about this issue in part due to a discussion I had on slashdot:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=214762&cid=17447596

Now the $5 million figure was simply something pulled out of the air, 
assuming that the current geometric growth of Wikimedia projects 
continue on its current course (not necessarily something good to assume 
here).  In trying to defend the WMF in this situation, I have assumed 
that server/bandwidth costs of displaying a read-only Wikipedia page are 
pretty much identical (within a general margin of error) to simply using 
a more conventional HTML server with static content.  Is there reason to 
assume this is pretty much the case?

I just don't see how in the case of this (fairly informed and current 
Wikimedia user) critic that a huge monitary savings could happen if 
production of Wikipedia articles was instead moved to something akin to 
the mailing lists, but a seperate mailing list for each Wikipedia 
article ((the mind boggles at the thought of the suggestion in the first 
place!))  Nupedia could have been able to get away with something like 
this, but that is also why Wikipedia blew Nupedia away in the dust oh so 
many years ago.

Certainly forecasting expenses for two or three years down the line is 
going to be a bit of an archane art at the moment, even though there are 
some hard statistics that at least can get you some rough idea of what 
is going to be needed in terms of operating the server farm and bandwidth.

Out of curiosity, are there any projections of what it may cost the WMF 
to maintian the current Wikimedia projects at current levels of response 
time in two years?

I know there are a bunch of unknown factors that would make such an 
estimate vary, such as disruptive technologies, local and international 
politics, gifts, legal requirements, MediaWiki optimizations, and 
changes to the makeup of Wikimedia editor/contributors.  Still, it is 
something that I hope is being looked at.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning