[Foundation-l] what do we do in the event the Foundation fails? - Re: Policy governance ends

Thu Apr 19 22:07:39 UTC 2007

On 4/18/07, Jeff V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
> I disagree.  The current hosting costs are at 60K/month.  The ISPs will
> not let WMF continue to operate for longer than a week or so without payment
> if they are like most hosters.  I doubt any of these groups will want
> the traffic, and all of them will start toying with the idea of posting
> google ads
> all over the place to make money.  The Libary of Congress or some other
> Government agency with deep pockets
> would be better choices.

The most serious threat I think is that some entity many users trust
(i.e. Google) decide at the point that the foundation fails to start
running a mirror of wikipedia hosted on their own servers.

This would play on the wider internet as Google coming to the rescue,
indeed many editors and admins would accept this portrayal.

Wikipedia (powered by google) would be faster, more uptime etc, and
look at all the cool new ajax editing features. And, don't mind the
ads :)

For those reasons I agree with Erik, the community is the most
important thing wikipedia has, and having a designating organization
to move to in the event of failure is a very important idea.

Judson
[[:en:User:Cohesion]]