Wikipedia’s Tin-Cup Approach Wears Thin
With about 300 million page views a day, Wikipedia by some estimates could be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. It doesn’t. Wikipedia’s business plan is, basically, to hold out a tin cup whenever it runs low on funds, which is very often. When it comes to money, “we are about as unsophisticated as we could possibly be,” Executive Director Sue Gardner said as she swept up Styrofoam packing nuts in the office in San Francisco, the foundation’s home since it relocated in January from St. Petersburg, Fla. “It’s time for us to grow up a little bit.”
Growing up can be hard to do.




