Simon Willison’s Weblog

Why doesn’t Wikipedia try something other than donations to make money?

16th November 2012

My answer to Why doesn’t Wikipedia try something other than donations to make money? on Quora

Wikipedia is run by a non-profit, and the content is created by volunteers for free. Those volunteers created that content under the understanding that it would be for the benefit of the species. Alternative methods of making money would break that assumed contract with their volunteers, and would likely damage their ability to encourage free contributions in the future.