Wikipedia’s funding mechanism used to be simple:
If you approach Light City by air—and there is no other way of approaching it, no roads, no port facilities—if you don’t fly they don’t want to see you in Light City—you will see why it has this name. Here the sun shines brightest of all, glittering on the swimming pools, shimmering on the white, palm-lined boulevards, glistening on the healthy bronzed specks moving up and down them, gleaming off the villas, the hazy airpads, the beach bars and so on.
Most particularly it shines on a building, a tall beautiful building consisting of two thirty-storey white towers connected by a bridge half-way up their length.
The building is the home of a book, and was built here on the proceeds of an extraordinary copyright law suit fought between the book’s editors and a breakfast cereal company.
However, the breakfast cereal lawsuit money is apparently running out. That is the only reasonable explanation for the fundraising letter pasted below.
If you haven’t donated to Wikipedia and have ever used it, please send them money. You know that no matter how much you or your friends may make fun of the site, you use it, and it is probably the greatest repository of human knowledge there ever has been.
Nobody needed to make Wikipedia. It was made and is maintained almost entirely by volunteers. And to keep it going and keep it free and public, users need to chip in. I thank you all for donating to this blog earlier in the year. Now, I ask you to please consider giving money to Wikipedia.
Click here to go throw them a few lucas, wouldn’t you?
Here’s the pitch: Continue reading
Setty's notebook 