Wow, we’ve never done this before. This is completely new to us.
ProleWiki relies on volunteer labour and efforts to function. Even the administration team (me and Forte) are volunteers on ProleWiki. None of us, from the editors to the techies, expect to be paid for our work on ProleWiki. We’re very happy to be involved in this project pro bono.
However, our providers do not work on a volunteer basis and we have to pay expenses to make ProleWiki.
Our donations and expenses are transparently reported here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Donate (end of the page), and as you can see we pay 132 USD every year to host ProleWiki on a VPS.
This VPS gives us 40 gigs of space, and we are starting to need more. We are looking at going up to 80 gigs of space, which should last us a while, but this would double our hosting costs to 264 USD per year. This space would make sure we can keep hosting texts, pages and pictures as well as possibly host even more stuff, like our own matrix server (the idea’s been passed around). It might also be spent on acquiring obscure texts so that we can add them to our library. We don’t really know yet as for now we’ve always operated at a loss and just covered our hosting expenses.
We’ve never asked for money before, but we are starting to have big plans with ProleWiki and definitely the extra space is something we are going to need sometime this year.
Thus, we are now asking for donations. Rest assured your donations will be used to cover our hosting expenses and any excess above 2 years’ time (528 USD) will be voted on by the editorship about what to do with it, if anything.
On this page: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Donate, you can find various ways of making a donation. If you have any question, please ask in the comments below.
Damn, I really wish I could fork over some donations to you folks, but I don’t have a way to pay for things internationally. :(
Hmm, is there a method we could enact that would work for you?
But honestly don’t worry too much about it, the response has been amazing so far and we are not only able to secure our new hosting plan for one year, we are one our way to be making 50$ a month on patreon – enough to cover the next 2 years (provided we keep that amount for a year)