Roger Luethi wrote:
Dreaming a little to the tune of $100,000,000 but with restrictions is hard, especially knowing that there is a real possibility that such a project may do more harm than good.
Well we want to make sure it will do more good than harm, to be sure.
And as soon as someone hands me $100,000,000 with no restrictions on what we do with it, we can do all kinds of interesting things. We'll put the mania in wikimania. ;-)
I wonder if content acquired within the restrictions you mentioned (pick any of the good suggestions made by others) could be used as a lever in some dual-licensing scheme (as used by several major open source software companies). As long as the content is under a free license but not in the public domain (e.g. GFDL or CC-BY-SA), we'd have a bargaining chip that we could parlay into access to other works. -- We can't do that for Wikipedia itself (because there is no single copyright owner), but if we owned a significant piece of desirable content, things might be different.
Now you're talking! Can we explore this more? Is there a sustainability model here? Can we use $X to leverage the content-freedom of $10X worth of good stuff?
--Jimbo