How Wikipedia and Flattr can together change the World

<i>The way it works is, your visitor has a Flattr account that he/she fills with some money each month.</i><p>Unfortunately that is where it falls apart.<p>The fund-raising model that "works" for Wikipedia is very different from the Flattr model. And I am not convinced that the Flattr model can scale up to the Wikipedia level.<p>(not to mention the fact that donations would be a lot more random, difficult to track and will come in fits &#38; spurts; which is basically useless when you reach the levels of money the WMF is after)<p><i>If wikipedia adopts Flattr as their micropayment solution, overnight tons of people will open a Flattr account. </i><p>I do not think this would happen as easily as suggested.

Why micropayments will not change the world: <a href="http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont-save-publishers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont...</a>

Why don't they have one ad, a homepage big box?<p>YouTube's big box costs $200-250k/day.<p>Even at $50k/day they could easily rake in 15 million+ and still be a little undersold.

The big problem with this idea (other than the fact that the wikipedia fundraising model isn't broken at all), is that it's asking Wikipedia to use it's hard-earned clout and prestige to "improve the world" in an area that is not part of it's focus (micropayments).<p>Not to mention that if a banner once a year asking for money looks awkward, a micropayments button next to every single article is going to look a lot worse.

Has anyone else noticed the double entendre in the name, "Flattr"? Flatter the recipient, and create a "flatter" distribution bypassing content middlemen.<p>I don't know whether this potential interpretation is/was intended. I skimmed their web site / blog, but I didn't see an allusion to the latter interpretation.