As the project matures, the risk tolerance should mature too.

Betting your own time and money on the realization of a crazy ideal can be very noble. Betting a resource millions of people are relying on is destructive hubris.

They should take the untamed idealism to a separate legal entity before they ruin all the good they've done.

"Millions of people" should either be putting their money (and their objections) where their mouth is or stop relying on someone else's resource. The reality is, that like Wikipedia, few people have donated to IA as a proportion of all its users.

The "good" that they've done is the "good" as the creator's see it, not the "good" as the freeloaders see it. All of which is to simply say that almost all users of IA are relying on the goodwill of the creators.

I wonder if there would be appetite for a sister organization—one with a more conservative, risk-averse, long-horizon attitude—to emerge to mirror IA’s core archives. Let IA keep doing what it’s doing, crazy risk and all; duplicate the conservative functions in a conservative organizational structure.