Recently I have read several news reports regarding funding for the wikimedia foundation. Regardless of whether the foundation is in need of a little cash I believe that it would be possible to greatly reduce the costs of operation by divvying up some of the server load to volunteers.
This would be done in a way analogous projects such as SETI@home, where anyone with access to a server could install a client and host data. For instance: I, as a student in college sometimes feel bad for not being able to contribute monetarily to the fundraising campaigns. I do however have access to a server that's using roughly 0.5% it's CPU and 1.5% of it's allocated bandwidth and would be more than willing to contribute those resources if it were possible.
I'm raising this topic from the standpoint of the 'idea' and would be most interested in discussion based on based around the assumption that it would be trivial to implement such a system. Whether or not that is the case is something to be explored as well, however I'd rather not get bogged down in implementation before discussing the concept.
If anyone has any suggestions or would be interested in helping please reply. I'm new around here so I'm not exactly sure what the next step should be :)