[Wikipedia-l] Re: Fundraising

[Daniel Mayer]

> But it is true that many German Wikipedias (and I'm one of them) think 
> that things are evolving much too slow, 

We are all volunteers here so I don't know why you think things are moving so 
slow. Everything seems to be running at an acceptable level considering the 
fact that we have grown from the 10,000th most popular website to the 1,000th 
most popular website in less than half a year. Sorry, but I just don't have 
sympathy for people who are impatient in light of these two facts. 

>and that there isn't much we can do about it. 

We could use more developers and more cash. That is something that can be 
done. 

>Our servers have been much too slow most of the time, but 
> Ibiblio has offered to host parts of the project or the whole thing if 
> we wanted. 

And Ibliblio would magically not be slow while hosting the 1,000th most 
popular website on the Internet while also hosting many other websites for 
free? 

>I'm sure others would also host Wikipedia with greatest 
> pleasure. But Jimbo has rejected this offer.

It is important for our developers to have complete access to the servers that 
Wikimedia projects run on. Otherwise outages will be significantly longer and 
we would not have any way to fix things ourselves when it is the server that 
is the problem. Read only mirrors are a very real possibility but in order to 
get that to work we need somebody to code the functionality. Jimbo supports 
the idea of read only mirrors but somebody has to code that to make it happen 
in a near real time and seemless way. Any volunteers?  

> Now we are waiting for him to fill out the foundation's request for tax 
> exempt status, 

And how is that going to be useful to anybody outside of the US? IIRC the 
paperwork has been filed but we are waiting on the super-efficient US federal 
government to make a decision. Sorry, but Jimbo can't control that. 

>to open a German/European bank account, 

Paypal accepts Euros and last time I checked Euros was the currency of 
Germany. But there are still plans to open a German/European bank account if 
that would make donating across the pond cheaper, but these plans are only a 
month or two old. Give Jimbo some breathing room and volunteer info on which 
banks would be best and even volunteer to act as an agent of the Wikimedia 
Foundation so that /you/ can open up the account on behalf of the foundation. 
/That/ would move the whole thing along. Remember Jimbo also has a business 
to run and nobody is paid to work on any Wikimedia project. 

>to buy a new server, etc.

The parts needed to upgrade our two severs has /already/ been bought by Jimbo  
and are going to arrive this week and be installed by Jason free of charge 
care of Jimbo. BTW, it is a bit selfish to think that he should continue to 
fork out more and more cash after already spending so much on Wikimedia. Give 
the guy a break and donate some Euros so that we can buy a new database 
server. 

/You/ can do a lot more than just complain. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)