[Slashdot] Wikipedia Hits 300K Articles

An anymous coward but nonetheless credible person comments on Wikipedia's growth challenges and how they spend the money donated to them:

"The funding isn't resolved. We're about to spend another $20,000 or so on more equipment and that will exhaust the currently available funds. [...] The budget side includes plans beyond currently available funds. Web servers are currently the hot item we're after - those max out at peak times.

Our growth is pretty simple: when we're fast we grow to use all the capacity until we're slow again. Still no sign of us hitting the limit on demand, so it appears that we'd have no problem at all serving more people if we had another $50,000-100,000 to spend - there are ballpark growth estimates suggesting that we'd end up doing that by the end of the year if we could stay fast until then.

If anyone wants to donate, as one of the hardware people, I'd rather see monthly recurring payments of a smaller amount than a lump sum. It makes it easier for me to try to predict what we can buy based on some moderate predictability of available funds."

Wikipedia is now bigger than fee-based Britannica. Quality varies from article to article but this self-organizing thing works rather well (somewhat surprisingly, depending on how much faith you put in the human species!).