[Wikipedia-l] Fundraising

Mon Jun 7 22:03:15 UTC 2004

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by
>the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations
>from the general public.
>  
>
I think we'll need a decent justification of that to make sure everyone 
understands why we need the money and what we're going to do with it.  
$100,000 is a *lot* of money, and I can imagine at least some people 
will be skeptical that it's entirely necessary---we have to give them at 
least some plausible reason to believe that it's really not possible to 
run the site reasonably well on, say, $50,000 worth of equipment instead 
(which would still be a lot of equipment!).  At the very least a 
proposed parts list with some explanation of why we need the various 
parts (and can't do with cheaper replacement for the very-expensive 
ones) would help---even non-techie people who aren't going to read it 
all the way through will be somewhat mollified by at least seeing that 
we've taken the time to put something like that up.

-Mark