[Wikimedia-l] An idea that may improve Wikipedia's fundraising

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

We did it in the past, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/DVD

Kevin Wayne Williams, 06/08/2013 18:52:
> Op 2013/08/06 9:40, Ziyuan Yao schreef:
>> The key point in my original idea is that you make buyers believe that
>> they're not just giving money away, but also getting some "solid
>> value" in
>> return. A Wikipedia DVD is a kind of "solid value".
> More like a complete set of Wikipedia Blu-Rays. I forget the actual byte
> count of Wikipedia these days, but it's well over anything you would
> want to try to store on DVDs.

Not really, a DVD-DL is usually (i.e. for all languages but en) enough 
thanks to openZIM's compression techniques; few years ago we didn't even 
need that, a normal DVD was enough.
As someone who spent countless hours working on the 2nd edition of the 
DVD in Italy around 2009 (which was never born), I'd of course like to 
see this done again, but there are a few problems from an economical POV.
1) "You are mad!" Publishing a DVD and hosting an open website are two 
entirely different matters. WMIT could earn a 10 years lawsuit for every 
single wrong sentence on Wikipedia; this must be handled by professional 
publishers.
2) "Not worth it". DVDs are extremely cheap nowadays (printing a few 
thousands, a packaged DVD-DL could cost around 0.10 € last time I 
checked), but for the same reason they don't sell a high prices and they 
don't make an interesting enough income to enter into negotiations with 
publishers and distributors. The areas with poor internet that would 
benefit from it tend also to have worse distribution.
3) Of course, trademarks. You probably want to stick the Wikipedia logo, 
and possibly other Wikimedia projects logos (there's space enough in a 
disc for all of them), on your DVD. It was hard enough to negotiate 
everything with the WMF a few years back even for an established 
chapter; it gets more restrictive month by month, so it would surely be 
a nightmare nowadays. It's probably not worth the few cents more (see 
previous point), I'd probably end up not using the Wikipedia logo at all 
but only my chapter's.

Nemo