[Foundation-l] Optional advertisement on wikipedia

Sun Apr 23 05:14:46 UTC 2006

On 4/23/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > I'd guess the open questions would be:
> >
> > 1) How would this impact the charitable non-profit status of WMF?
> >
>
> The general rule is that a non-profit organization should have at least
> one-third of its annual income come from a combination of: governmental
> donations, donations from other public charities, and small (less than
> 2% of total income each) donations from the general public and private
> charities (large donations can still have the first 2% counted).  If
> that all adds up to less than 1/3, things get considerably more complicated.
>
> Whether advertising income would cause a problem depends on how much we
> expect to get, and how much in large donations from private individuals
> and charities we typically get.

Hmm. Well, iff we actually had a good handle on our donation income
stream we could control the advertising to avoid crossing that line
(just disable it even for users that have it on if it's bringing in
too much).. but I don't get the impression that we have enough
visability into our future donations. :)