[Wikipedia-l] Donation History

[Jaap van Ganswijk]

At 2004-01-02 01:47, Erik Moeller wrote:
>Jaap-
>> It seems that paying for the hardware and bandwidth
>> can be done by the authors, but I don't think it should.
>> The readers should pay for it, either directly or by
>> having to lookat/ignore advertisements.
>
>Fundraising is perfectly fine.

I have nothing against fundraising amongst individuals.

>People will just have to get used to it.  

It's not new.

>We'll do it once a year and cover our operating costs that way.

Why not raise much more using advertising and pay the authors
some?

As I said, I have a site with free information myself and
everyday I have to choose between writing for Wikipedia for
free and anonymously or on my own site 'nonymously' and
getting paid for it.

There still seem to be enough people willing to be amateur
writers for a couple of hours a day, but you can't expect
professional writers to write for money all day and then
write for free in their spare time.

>Sure, Google text-ads aren't too bad, but if we can easily
>do without them, why bother?

It's probably less bother than having to raise money through
charity drives etc.

>Maybe I can even convince Jimbo to drop his silly "government  
>money is evil" stance.

I'm against the government subsidizing anything that should
be able to gain it's own money. Wikipedia is clearly something
that should be able to make it's own money. People using a free
encyclopedia should be willing to pay for it by ignoring ad's.

It's not that hard. On TV or radio it's much harder, because
they are broadcast during a certain space in time and there
is nothing other to watch or listen too. When it's just a part
of your screen, you can look at another part.

What is your fundamental problem with advertising, since you
seem to have one?

Advertising when applied properly is also additional information.
People or companies find products or services via advertising
that they otherwise might not have found. Some advertisers on
my site (including myself) promote services that a lot of
visitors didn't know existed and that I didn't existed before
I started my site and that now provide most of my income.

(It's providing chips that aren't produced anymore or are
scarce for another reason.)

Even when I answer messages in newsgroups, telling people that
they can ask us to search for scarce chips for them I get
thank-you letters.

You shouldn't let the excess of advertising that's on TV and
radio (especially in the USA) blur your mind about this issue.

There is nothing wrong with a modest use of on-topic,
non-screaming and non-misleading ads. Of course on a serious
site like mine I never allowed too excessive advertising.
(Which is a changing notion of course.)

>Our project is so international that it should be  
>possible to get EU funds.

But why? In heaven's name? Please consider that every euro
that you would get, will have gone through several layers
and eacah layer will have taken his part of the loot. First
the tax-collector, then the country, then the EU, then the
civil servants and their third-party adviser friends that
allot the money. Also consider the centimeter thick
applications you'll have to write or rather will have to
have written (and those guys probably don't work on a
no-cure-no-pay basis) and your project will only get
money as long as it's hip and that can change anytime.

What when the big regular encyclopedia publishers find out
and send their flock of lobbyists to Brussels?

>This model of voluntary giving will become much more wide-spread. It's  
>called the [[gift economy]].

Like in shareware, which never really worked on a big scale? ;-)

Greetings,
Jaap