The dialog goes on... pfctdayelise answered to my answer, and once again it would be unfair manipulation if I hid the fact that I admit she has the main point over me. So here we go in public, again.

• Thanks for this detailed response, it was a nice surprise. But I think your line of thought is not quite correct.

and you actually happen to be right. I went to carefully reread her statement and I have to admit that I simply overlooked what you point out. Sometimes I act under the impression of a dominant tinge in a text (such was the cut part, in this case) and I get caught into overlooking other no less important details. So it's really nice you pointed out things, and BTW it's yet another evidence that if people use their brains, instead of attacking each other from ideological positions, finding consensus is definitely possible.

I publicly retire my 4th vote, accordingly. I will use this dialog-like format, because much of what you say is IMHO relevant for the community at-large and it needs being discussed in public. Whoever might want to read your original comment in full can do it here.

• The difficulty is in hosting English Wikipedia. Everything else comes cheap after that. If you have 10 decently sized wikis, it costs next to nothing to add another 500 that are tiny. So if we want to cut costs, perhaps we should sell English Wikipedia, cut it loose? ;)
• I think you read meaning into Kate's statement that isn't there. She said, 'Finally, the reason I think Wikipedia should be our only project: because "it's enough".' That is an ideological reason, not a financial one at all.

You're right, ant this is why this answer goes public. As per costs, I really don't know what the costs are, when I read the WMF financial statements all I see is a very synthetic balance, with no indication of details. Yet, if the problem is en.wiki (and I bet you're 100% right with this) we should also note that 99% of our financial incomes come from en.wiki. So cutting en.wiki loose would mean loosing our income, too.

The problem seems to be that en.wiki does generate a lot of money, but that money is not even enough to support en.wiki alone. Is it? I don't know... when I look at the financial statement (see pag. 5) I find that internet hosting + salaries and wages + depreciation add up to ~29% of the income (was 25% in 2007). Besides, the numbers involved are big, but not as huge as you'd expect for world site #10. In all we have run through 2006 with a consolidated expenditure of 440K$ (for the three expenditure chapters I quoted). It was ~25% in 2005, according to the same source.

If we analyze the dynamics of the expenditure chapters we see that most of our expenditure growth doesn't go to machines at all: salaries and wages rose of 7 points (17 -> 24% of our income) while hosting only rose of 2 points, from 41% to 43% and depreciation fell from 41% to 32%. Don't take this stuff as a statement of any kind, as it's no more than a voter who's thinking aloud, trying to evaluate candidates' statements. Yet I guess it helps putting things in perspective. At the worst it can be totally wrong, and it can push someone else to provide a public correction. So we finally can start to speak about real numbers, and not about abstract principles.

An interesting point is the composition of our income, which is unspecified. How much do we get from dangerous sources (that is, corporate donors who may have a vested interest in their donations) and how much from simple people who give 10 bucks and cannot ask nothing in return? I mean, this is far from being a meaningless datum, I believe that a full list of corporate donors should be published. How much did they give and when. At that point by simply reading the histories of our articles the general public could check how neutral we remained after getting our gifts. Wouldn't that be fair?

Lots of words I wrote, and after all this I'm still unclear on the main issue: should we worry about having too little money? Well, with a net positive result equivalent to half of our income and worth half a million dollars one would hardly say that we are going to be bankrupt in a second... then again, I guess we should have a more analytical statement, before making final assertions. Yet I suppose one thing is well evident: it's the wild dimensional growth. If you put in line the figures of our cash availability at the beginning of the year you get a growth leading you from 9K to 500K$ in two years. Yet you also get a growth curve that has a fantastic 1495% value in 2006 and only a 300% value in 2006. You obviously don't make a trend by coupling two numbers, yet one must judge with the data he/she has, and this is as much as reality tells us.

I guess that this particular slowing curve may be a source for actual worries. So far the dike rises faster than the water, but it's slowing pace. So... big thanks to you for pushing me to dig out this stuff. LOL after telling everyone they should say what exactly they mean I finally started to talk real numbers myself, instead of using empty principles...how bloody lazy can we all be, ah?

• Firstly volunteers write for what they want. It's impossible to say "you are supposed to work on this", because people will just walk away.

True, I took a clear stand on this here, not too long ago. I guess you and I have a different background on this issue, though. You come from a major language and a major project, I don't. As Whiteknight noted in another worthy comment, small projects are different. One of our constant worries is marketing, as I believe it was in the beginning of en.wiki, too. So while we never tell anyone what they should do, we do constantly analyze how we could move to getter a larger market share and a better press. Sometimes what we try doesn't help at all, sometimes it works. Regional language wikies just made the front page in the major newspaper of our area, hopefully it will increase our traffic and give us more active users. You don't get this much attention for a small project unless you start to look for it. So it's everybody's interest to do it, in order to enlarge the community.

• I think the popularity of the different projects is only a reflection of their relative age, their progress in the wiki life cycle.

True, yet wikipedia will retain this advantage for the very same reason. Whatever we do, for our general public our brand will stay based on the pedias, no way out of that. Coca-Cola may start to build cars, but the brand would not change for that.

• I just know it can't be page hits or number of visitors.

Why? I mean, we either become a self-celebrative sect of people who live on their own (but then we don't need big servers at all, it's ~100K people in all, if you count only active contributors) or we admit we are working for a public purpose. Yet, if we are working for a public audience, it can only be that audience to judge us. We offer them content, they can either take it, leave OR change it. The latter is infrequent (we don't have that many contributors to justify even just a #1000 Alexa rank, if we are to count wikipedians only), yet is the main character of this project(s).

The number of pages and visitors is what gives us the money to go on. UNESCO may praise us, but sadly nobody is going to spend a single cent because of them. You get only a small percent of users to become contributors in time and/or money. If you don't have traffic you just end up missing your income.

• Anyway my point is, given another five years, who knows what people will be visiting, what they will be "voting" for? The timeline seems to short to me, like "X project is not successful like Wikipedia RIGHT NOW; therefore it must go".

That's right. If you poke around meta you'll find a number of places where I say that there cannot be anything like a defined period of time for projects standing in the incubator. Projects aren't made of milk and have no need for a final date stamped on them. Some of them may take pretty long to grow up and still be among our best projects.

Thanks Elise :) I do hope more people will read our financial statements and start to think about it and to discuss them. Electing representatives is fine, but if it gets to the point in which one doesn't even try to understand what's happening because that's my rep's job it can only lead people to speak about policy creep and the like... The WMF can be pretty educative in this field, too.