Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales is raising funds again from users. It’s an annual occurrence. Wikipedia’s free-to-access crowd-sourced encyclopaedia is a noble cause and extremely useful. I’ve chipped in again and would happily pay a subscription.

Wikipedia’s fundraising efforts demonstrate that however worthy a community or social project it needs assured finance if it isn’t to rely solely on volunteer effort. And even then there are basic costs that need to be met.

Yet we’ve entered a period of almost dot com-like exuberance where social projects are launched almost daily without a business model based on financial return or indeed any of the alternative economic metrics outlined in Chris Anderson’s book Free.

Ultimately I think that Wikipedia’s fundraise shows that there no such thing as free – just different ways financing a project.

Someone always has to pay.