[EM] Funding our wiki host

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi everyone,

I'm starting to see more and more of you over on Electowiki, which is
kinda awesome.  You can see the recent edits here:
<https://electowiki.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges>

Moreover, I see frequent references to Electowiki URLs on this mailing
list.  This will hopefully be a virtuous loop where Electowiki gets
more reliable because the content gets vetted by a big group of
election methods experts (i.e. you all), and in turn, the conversation
on this mailing list gets better because there's an easy place to go
to look up what people on this list mean when they use SCIJNOEU (some
completely inscrutable jargon no one else uses)  :-D

All this activity is mostly a really good thing!  Hopefully, the more
of us that edit Electowiki, the better it becomes, which causes
election method advocates to want to link to Electowiki, which causes
search engines to increase traffic to Electowiki, which causes more
people to use Electowiki (and possibly edit it).  What could be wrong
with that?

Well, hosting a wiki isn't free, especially when the traffic starts
going up.  Back when Electowki was on Dreamhost, I was using the
freebee hosting that came with my Dreamhost account (which includes
hosting this mailing list, too).  However, now that Electowiki is
hosted by Miraheze, I'm not personally paying the bill.  I am on the
board of Miraheze, and I've now donated a couple of times to Miraheze
(most recently today), but I'm hoping you all can help.

In particular, there's a GoFundMe link that one of the site
reliability engineers for Miraheze put online:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/7uj22x-help-miraheze-stay-online

That^ fundraising drive is for £3,000 GBP, which translates to about
$3,900 USD today.  Will that keep Miraheze running forever?  Nope.
That will help support this year's anticipated growth in traffic and
usage .  But you can see from the Miraheze Finance page[1] (and
looking back at FY2019, 2018, 2017), that will hopefully be enough to
last a while assuming traffic doesn't grow wildly.

Now, your next question might be: "hey wait a sec, wasn't the old host
a 'freebee' with Dreamhost?  How much did this 'freebee' cost you
Rob?"  Well, my Dreamhost account is currently only costing me about
$10/month, so ... eh, whatever.  Maybe it's $20/month.  I can't
remember.  It's a "tax" I've been paying long enough that I haven't
really thought about it, and I use my Dreamhost account for a lot of
things.  Even if I only used my Dreamhost account for Electowiki, that
would still be much less than $3,900 per year, let alone per month.
So, "what gives?"

Well, it's true that Miraheze is spending more than I was for my
"freebee" wiki from Dreamhost, but Miraheze has some really good
MediaWiki hosting that allows for VisualEditor to be on (so you can
use a WYSIWYG editor rather than edit wiki text).  Also, they're
really good at fighting off spammers.  And, most importantly, that
$3,900 is not *just* for Electowiki.  It's for all of the wikis that
Miraheze hosts.  The biggest wiki they host is allthetropes.org, but
they also host a few thousand other wikis as well.  I have no idea
where Electowiki ranks in terms of overall traffic to Miraheze, but
it's clear from the chatter on the Miraheze Discord server that there
are a lot of active wikis on Miraheze.

But just because there are a lot of other wikis, we still should pay
our share.  Miraheze is currently being operated on an all-volunteer
basis by folks that either have other day jobs, or are still in
college (or maybe both).  They've figured out how to run this
completely on the cheap.  But the key word is "cheap", not "free".
Any chance you can help us?

https://www.gofundme.com/f/7uj22x-help-miraheze-stay-online

Rob

p.s. note the beneficiary of the GoFundMe is "Owen Reece Baines ".
He's the Miraheze Treasurer (among other things)[2]

[1] Miraheze Finance page: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance
[2] Miraheze Board: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board