You laugh?

I see a time when Wikipedia will be selling ad space for big money and the "foundation" will convert WP to a taxable entity. The "charity" thing is not working.

Timeline? By article 3,000,000 is my best estimate, or mid 2008.

Then, of course, Wikipedia will be sold or go public in much the same way Google did.

Wikia is not a substitute for WP. Sorry folks, it is not working out that way.

On what basis do you claim that operating on donations isn't working?

Hmm... I said the same thing last year, about how they'd be putting up banner ads by, well, this past April I think it was. There were certainly some vague hints that they were thinking about it, but still no banner ads.

One thing that isn't mentioned much is that they're probably benefiting enormously from the improvements made to MySQL over the past two years. The latest versions are a huge improvement, in my opinion at least... So much better, in fact, that we're starting to see commercial companies talk about supporting it in products that cost $1K per seat in some cases. It's easier to manage now, and uses disk access and bandwidth more efficiently, both on a single server and on a widely-distributed mirroring and replication setup like Wikipedia has... There are also other improvements that are probably helping them keep bandwidth and hardware costs down, like server virtualization, advanced analysis tools, and so on.

Well, if I was running Wikipedia, they'd have introduced banner ads by the time that they got to article 50,000, or by the time that it was costing us too much to run it. Sure, ads are an inconvenience, but so what? Sometimes they can be useful anyway, if its related to what is on the topic.

I am bemused that Wikipedia has gone this long, got this big, and has this high an overhead and still doesn't have banner ads, or any kind of paid version.

I remember on LiveJournal there was a time when they were losing huge amounts of money through not getting enough income, and they worked out a way to get paid accounts and an attractive enough structure to keep it all free, and within a year they went from massive losses to massive gains. Why can't Wikipedia do the same thing? Maybe paid accounts, maybe banner ads, there has to be some way that they can do it that they can make the money up.

In order to make money doing that, they would have to make "editing" the encyclopedia a "paid" action, since their stated goal is to make the "knowledge free"...so you can't add "for just $5.95 a month" onto that statement.

I think that even they can't see how they could decently ask people to pay to do what is essentially a job....but I'm also convinced that many of the hardcore editors on WP would pay to do just that, just to get their fix.

I've read this kind of thing before on WReview with some incredulity at the arguments presented. Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but I've always viewed ads as inherently corrupting. And when juxtaposed with content which desires to have some kind of integrity, they are usually an immoral and dangerous influence. But then I'm comfortable in environments where ad-free content is a norm and appreciate the benefits.

I'm sure a significant number of Wikipedia contributors think the same way. The introduction of ads on wikipedia would be impractical for one due to the potential to corrupt content, and would probably become the single most destructive force to wikipedia in regards to editor exodus. WP with ads would mean shedding the last veneer of public spirited volunteer altruism that encouraged most of the best editors, exposing the cynicism that actually lies behind the WMF. So perhaps we should welcome them.

What donations? WP cash in the bank is hardly going to pay anyone to do anything.

The net worth of the "Foundation" (Less than $2,000,000) versus the potential liability that said foundation will have when confronted with just one successful attack at it's core.

The IRS will go after anything and everything that resembles conflict at the core. The Foundation's tax exempt status is not in stone. The intersection of Wikia and Wikipedia is very close, indeed.

$100 dollar bills agains multi-million dollar law suits by individuals, corporations and politicians that have been the victims of vandalism and careless policy makes the foundation vulnerable to financial destruction and clearly not capable of any meaningful defense against a barage of litigation. The above is inevitable, in our society. Pro-bono litigation may sound good and honorable in law school but it does not pay tuition for private boarding schools and elite schools.
Incentive pay becomes a powerful tool for retention of any long term talent.

Greed. WP represents another vast resource for corporations looking at the search engine models and site models that are, in fact, getting large funding from empires such as that of Rupert Murdoch, aka, News Corp. Google will get paid and they will pay. It will cost more and more to get to the top of the Google model. It will cost less to buy WP than it would to attempt a start-up.

National security and privacy will prove to be a significant reason why an offset of potential liabilities will take place.

We will see banner ads and much more, in my opinion. Unfortunately, ads, at first, will not make WP more reliable; only a major policy change will do that.

They couldn't do this if they wanted to. A non-profits assets can only be used for non-profit purposes. If they close their doors all assets (including intangibles such as "good faith", trademarks, name recognition etc) have to be transfered to a different non-profit entity. If they fail to do this it would escheat to the state.

A for-profit fork could be be created but if it involves any of the WP principals (Wales, Angela, WMF Trustees past and present, other key employees) it would be seen as self dealing by people who owe a duty of trust and loyalty to the non-profit and be treated as basically theft against WMF.

Wales might regret organizing WP as a non-profit but he will have to live with the consequences.

I was always secretly in favor of placing ads on the site just to drive some of the problem editors who were virulently anti-ad away for good.

Are Wikia links still lacking the no-follow? If they are, that answers your questions right there. If that has changed, then ads will undoubtedly cause a problem, as Wikipedia would be heavily profiting off of the information in the external links while not sharing the wealth with the owners.

A nice little hole that's been dug here.

Not for profit can go to for profit very quickly if the "Foundation" has multi-billion dollar bids in the wings. Past taxes and other issues go away very quickly with 9 or 10 zeros floating around.

Corporations change stripes all the time these days.

Mr. Murdoch paid $600,000,000 for MySpace. It is now estimated he could get twice that price.

Google shares are topping $600 per share today.

The most amazing thing is that it cost very little money for WP to have thousands of editors build the project.

"Rich people can do whatever they want" brings us to the dead-end of meaningful discussion.