[Foundation-l] Advertisement

Sun Dec 31 05:03:55 UTC 2006

Teun Spaans wrote:

>In addition to Jeroens post, I agree with him that a borderline seems to
>have been crossed. We never mentioned the name of any other company on the
>top of any page. I regret this form of advertisement, but wont cancel my
>contribution, like many others. The borderline between sponsorship and
>advertisement is razorthin, especially with virgin unite, which is viewed by
>some as an advertisement agency for the company.
>
>I wonder:
>
>6) Has there ever been an open call to all wikipedians to provide
>suggestions to the foundationboard of ways to receive money?
>
The difficulty here is for people who may understand their personal 
finances reasonable well to extrapolate their understanding of finances 
to the situation faced by a multinational non-profit with no model to go by.

A small local organization can function very well on bake sales, but 
that form of fundraising does not scale well at all.  Requests about 
this sort of thing tend to be met with silence.  People who think about 
servers by reference to the large hard drives in their own computers 
find it difficult to grasp the need for hundreds of servers.  This kind 
of debate is not new; it reflects the kind of research that C. Northcote 
Parkinson put into the development of his law.

Ec