[EM] Funding our wiki host

[VoteFair]

Thank you Rob for giving us this URL.  Previously I had tried donating 
to Miraheze but it only gave me the Paypal option, which I do not use.

I was only able to donate a small amount, but I know it's a great 
investment in civilization's future.

Rob, thank you for all you do for election-method reform!

Richard Fobes

On 1/29/2020 4:38 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> 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
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