Wikipedia:Funding

Who pays for wikipedia and why? I mean, I know that it's Bomis, but why does Bomis do it? Does Bomis make money from wikipedia either directly or indirectly, or is the cost of the server incidental to Bomis, or what? Also, could this answered on some FAQ such as wikipedia:overview FAQ, since I doubt that I am the only one curious about this. -- AdamRaizen

Jimbo Wales, the majority owner of Bomis, pays for Wikipedia out of the kindness of his heart. Bomis makes no money from it, and Jimbo has promised never to run ads here. See Wikipedia and Bomis for more information. There has been talk from time to time of starting a non-profit organisation. -- Tim Starling 00:51 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

Following on from this, a thought therefore occurs to me- should Jimbo become disheartened with the project, or should circumstances arise where Jimbo personally could no longer continue to support the project, would this mean that Wikipedia would disapear and all our efforts have been in vain, or are backup systems in place to ensure that wikipedia would continue no matter what? This isn't intended to be critical or anything, just a query about long term sustainablity based on the permaculture principle that no element (or individual) within a system should be indispensible, for should that element fail (or individual go away) for any reason then the whole system collapses...quercus robur 21:15 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

The complete article database is backed up weekly, with the latest dumps available for download. I keep these backups on CD, and I hope others do as well. If the non-profit ever comes together (Jimbo, we're waiting for news... :) that'll provide some protection against the Jimbo TruckNumber factor regarding infrastructure (the server, the connection, the domain name). The content itself is protected by the GNU Free Documentation License, which makes all the content redistributable and modifiable. --Brion 04:43 Apr 15, 2003 (UTC)