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... trademarked ... according to wiki ...

The irony is strong with this one ...

Many years ago, I started taking all my 'text-editor-alike' notes, setup up a wiki (dokuwiki plug, but there's definitely others like Mediawiki, ect.) and added a bit of light wiki markup to them equaled instant, half-ass-looking pro-like documentation with an authentication/group control wrapper around it (e.g. local accounts or AD/LDAP tie-in).

I don't know what organization you are in or what you can/cannot setup on a whim --- but that's what I'd do. It's SUPER cool to hear you actually care about documentation and daily note taking, ect., but the step beyond IMHO is a searchable and share-able interface to it.

And even taking documentation with you is a cinch --- I just recently changed jobs and I was able to take 8+ years worth of documentation/notes/you-name-it that wasn't company specific or had a NDA attached to it, tarball it up, set up a new wiki, unpack it and I was done.

At most if you really hate the wiki, just write a few reg-ex commands to mostly strip off your markup business and you're left with what you've started: ASCII text files again.

The article summary speaks of "millions of dollars spent" on a new discussion system for Wikipedia. The article actually tells a very different story -- the LiquidThreads extension started out as a Google Summer of Code project, was funded for a while by an interested third party, and then received a little attention from the Wikimedia Foundation (one designer, one developer) before development was put into maintenance mode. I would ballpark the total money spent around $100-$150K max. Elapsed time does not equate money spent. LQT continues to be in use on a number of projects, but its architecture and UX needed to be fundamentally overhauled.

Flow, the designated successor to LQT, continues to be in development by a small team, and is gradually being deployed to appropriate use cases. It is now running on designated pages in a couple of Wikipedia languages, and old LiquidThreads pages are being converted over using a conversion script developed by the Flow team. Contrary to the article's claim, WikiEducator upgraded to a recent version of LQT, and will be able to migrate to Flow in future using the conversion script.

You can give Flow a try in the sandbox on mediawiki.org and see for yourself whether the article's claims are hyperbole or not. Disclaimer: I am the person referenced in the headline of the Wikipediocracy article, so take my view with a grain of salt, as well. ;-)

There's plenty around. Here's one: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/...

Ignore that advice about Confluence. That product is HARD to use imo. Mediawiki is way better.

BTW - New version of Mediawiki have a rich text editor built in. You probably want to turn that on.

The Guardian reported on a hidden Latin message: TrueCrypt probably didn't leave a Latin message alerting users to NSA spying. I'm not so sure about their in-headline conclusion, though.

They quote this comment on Wikipedia by 'Bardon':

There is a hidden message on the new sourceforge TrueCrypt site. The first line of the site is this: WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues

If you take just the first letter of each word, except the word "WARNING":

Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues

you get this:
uti nsa im cu si

It's Latin that roughly means:
Unless I want to use the NSA

So, the full message seems to be this:
WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues, unless I want to use the NSA

Which is English that roughly means:
Don't use TrueCrypt because it is under the control of the NSA

The Guardian article rebuffs this with: "In fact, "uti nsa im cu si" is meaningless in Latin - except to Google translate, (mis)translates it to the message Badon discovered."

But isn't that enough? It's a hidden message; it doesn't need to be correct Latin as long as the point gets across. If you put into Google Translate right now, you get "If I wish to use the NSA". Unusual that it's been changed slightly, but still expresses the same message: The NSA has compromised TrueCrypt.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but this entire TrueCrypt saga has been bizarre. Obviously something happened beyond "the task of maintaining a widely used cryptography program just became too much work" or else why not just say that?

The summary is wrong:
* Michael Maggs is NOT from the Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia#Team - He is simply a Commons Bureaucrat (like a super-sysop)

187 people?! What the hell do they do all day?

Operate the 8th largest website [1] and develop FOSS software [2] among other things.

A click through ToS would never be upheld.

Anyone want to inform Wikimedia of this? It expects editors to abandon copyright in changes that they submit to end-user help pages for MediaWiki.

Here's the VisualEditor FAQ which states:

• 24 June: A/B test on the English Wikipedia. VisualEditor is released by default to 50% of newly registered accounts.
• 1 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia, available for all logged-in users.
• 8 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia, available for anonymous and logged-in users.
• 15 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to most large Wikipedia wikis, available for all users. Which wikis are in this list is still to be determined, but will definitely include Wikipedia in German, French and Italian.
• 29 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to all other Wikipedia wikis, available for all users, minus a few wikis (such as the Chinese Wikipedia) where the VisualEditor does not yet work.

Also of interest from that FAQ is that the VisualEditor can be installed on any MediaWiki installation, including personal wikis. As a MediaWiki user at home, I've found it a cool way to journal and track a lot of personal projects but the limit to using it has always been remembering wiki markup. This will go a long way to eliminating that problem.

The headline is about one program -- for non-smartphones that can access by SMS, but not by WAP or HTTP. And yes, non-smartphones (e.g. Nokia S40) are quite popular over there, though I believe almost all new ones do have at least a rudimentary browser these days.

The summary is about a completely different program called Wikipedia Zero where they negotiate with wireless providers to provide access to m.wikipedia.org at zero charge for customers whose handsets have browsers and GPRS/UMTS/HSPA/WTFever capability (but not an unlimited data plan -- without this deal, they might be paying per megabyte, or be struggling to remain under a small data cap). Which is why it's a great improvement over access to the non-mobile version (which you can still jump to if it's worth it for a particular article), or to the mobile version at full /MB pricing or data-cap usage.

The headline is about one program -- for non-smartphones that can access by SMS, but not by WAP or HTTP. And yes, non-smartphones (e.g. Nokia S40) are quite popular over there, though I believe almost all new ones do have at least a rudimentary browser these days.

The summary is about a completely different program called Wikipedia Zero where they negotiate with wireless providers to provide access to m.wikipedia.org at zero charge for customers whose handsets have browsers and GPRS/UMTS/HSPA/WTFever capability (but not an unlimited data plan -- without this deal, they might be paying per megabyte, or be struggling to remain under a small data cap). Which is why it's a great improvement over access to the non-mobile version (which you can still jump to if it's worth it for a particular article), or to the mobile version at full /MB pricing or data-cap usage.

MediaWiki developers are almost ready for Lua scripting to be enabled for all Wikipedia and related sites, and It has already been deployed to http://mediawiki.org./ Lua was chosen mostly because of how easy it is to sandbox and limit memory consumption.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting/Tutorial -- Introduction

MediaWiki developers are almost ready for Lua scripting to be enabled for all Wikipedia and related sites, and It has already been deployed to http://mediawiki.org./ Lua was chosen mostly because of how easy it is to sandbox and limit memory consumption.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting/Tutorial -- Introduction

Using Lua instead of the current template syntax will not mean much for editors of articles and nobody claimed it would. It will only make (huge) difference for those who currently write templates.

On the other hand, there is also some work going on to make editing of articles easier using a WYSIWYG editor.

That's the precise problem. 1. the language was never designed, it accreted, and is mathematlcally impossible to describe fully in most sensible formats. 2. we can't throw it away because there's billions of words of text in it accumulated over ten years. 3. we can't throw it away because the existing editor base demand it stay because they're used to it.

So WMF is (a) throwing money as well as brilliance at the problem, and (b) has put Brion Vibber onto sorting out what is to be removed from wikitext, because he's one of two people (Tim Starling the other) that people will accept the opinion of on this matter. All proceeds well :-)

So now the problems are with seriously complicated things like doing bidirectional text properly - a hard requirement for an international project, and one that is not done quite properly by anyone else. Something where mere dev brilliance has half a chance :-)

SemanticMediaWiki(SMW) can utilize triple-stores (proper RDF databases). But even without using one you can make still run queries from within wiki. You create the new query by using a special query-page and after you are satisfied with it, you embed it in any wiki-page. Next, whenever you view this page, the semantic-results come always fresh on that page. Compared to a RelationDB, SMW comes bundled with UI. You just have to learn a new syntax for running the queries.

Now to get the results in different formats you have multiple choices. I remind you that each wiki-page is at the same time a REST API. And SMW follows this path, providing specific query-parameters for getting query-results as CSV, as XML, as text, as html-tables, or any html-structure. And there are numerous extensions for embeding the results into google-maps(assuming they are geo-coords), event-calendars (assuming dates), graphs, trees, and many more.

Oh. Just in case you want to look at what Wikipedia's doing: Extension:VisualEditor.

Funny, you must not have looked very hard. There was also FCKeditor before that.

Funny, you must not have looked very hard. There was also FCKeditor before that.

I personally work at a virtual company, and aside from a neighbor which also works there, I have rarely met my coworkers in person. We use WebEx in order to have online meetings, and work on things together. We use Groopex Integrated Conferencing to integrate WebEx with our corporate site to easily schedule meetings and launch them. We use Google Apps to share various office documents around. We use MediaWiki to keep track of current projects, todo lists, documentation, and other important information. Lastly, for source code, we use various version control system with nice web frontends so the managers can see that we actually work on things.

For quick conversation with coworkers, we have an IRC server, and if we really need someone else urgently, we just pick up this archaic technology known as the "telephone".

Ah, so a computer program, song, or book is an "idea". OK. You don't need anything other than your head to have an idea, so you don't need a computer to share a program or song, yes?

To have an idea, no. To share an idea I might need language, or paper and pencil or even a whole movie to adequately do it.

I am supposed to believe a poll of "1,000 16- to 50-year-olds with internet access" commissioned by a politically biased group without knowing how the poll participants were chosen nor the questions asked? Would you accept a poll commissioned by RIAA with blind faith?

OK. A study by the University of Amsterdam:
http://www.ivir.nl/publications/vaneijk/Communications&Strategies_2010.pdf
By the Business School of Norway: http://www.bi.no/Content/Article____74866.aspx
By the Canadian Department of Industy:
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/en/h_ip01456e.html

All biased.

ZeroPaid as a source? Really? Do you have access to any non-biased sources? No? Didn't think so, you closed-minded fuck.

Zeropaid is just the guy who made an article from MPAA own number. Who could have clicked on their source, on Hollywood.com:
http://images.hollywood.com/site/HISTORICAL_AND_YTD_BOX_OFFICE_2009.pdf

You are hoisted on your own petard, dumbass.

No, Mr, I didn't. The total income is still greater. If it comes from recorded or live, I don't really care. It still means the increase on file sharing is not hurting artists.

Tell, shithead, do you still wear the clothes you did 15 years ago? Did you alter them yourself or take them to a tailor to be modified? Or, did you BUY NEW ONES? Well, what was it, asshole?

So what you are saying is that, even when people have the possibility of fixing their stuff, they buy new?
Well, then by that argument open sourcing is not that bad.

To answer your question, yes, I paid for tailors to fix my clothes, and yes I have 10+ year old clothes I still use. Not 15, since I've grew somewhat since I was 10.

Your analogy has the car as the software, not the computer. Now, if you don't know what you have already said, maybe you should shut the fuck up. Or, is it that you are trying to change your argument on the fly?

Where do you see the word computer on my analogy? Just because you're unable to apply it to software doesn't mean it wasn't my intent.

Wikipedia is software? No, it is a website whose articles are often biased and/or wrong.

Wikipedia is software, yes. You can download it here. Whether is on web format or a rich client is irrelevant.

Android and WebOS are both Linux, are operating systems, and are almost exclusively run on proprietary hardware where loading a new OS is difficult at best. The same goes for all those embedded Linux devices, in which the user almost never interacts with the OS, but are in fact appliances.

So? It's still open source being run by millions of people.

So, there are over 500,000 FLOSS FAILURES, including Linux on the desktop, for every moderate success. Tell me, where is OOo in your list? How about GNUCash? How about GIMP? Oh, wait, none of those are really successes. Most of the users for GIMP would prefer to use Photoshop. Even FLOSS supporters don't like GNUCash. All I ever hear about OOo is how slow it is and how it has crappy compatibility with MS Office.

Should I list the millions of c

There seems to be a few 3rd party services that rely on Wikipedia's data. I'm sure there are many commercial services too (I've seen many pay-per-click sites simply barf wikipedia content surrounded by ads).

Instead of ads, could Wikimedia charge for a it's APIs to allow access to Wikipedia's data? Like most services, you get your developer key for a limited number of queries, but as the request volume goes up, you pay more. Bulk-exporting several pages? Pay a small fee. If the fees are low and reasonable, maybe businesses would pay for them and not result to screen-scraping?

The data itself is still covered under CC/FDL licenses; the charge is just for friendly access to it.

Just a thought.

A wiki is a good tool for accumulating and summarizing insights revealed in a discussion forum, enabling new members of the forum to quickly get up to speed, and providing a resource for decision-makers.

Such a wiki can be hierarchically structured, providing quick summaries at the top-level, but allowing people to drill down to specific points.

But a normal wiki is no good for contentious topics, because a lack of consensus causes editing wars.

That's why I made Make The Case, a wiki where an article is a case for or against a particular proposition, but which also allows people to provide and edit paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttals, which are displayed alongside.

Unlike debate spread over separate articles, or in a forum, this gives false information and spin nowhere to hide, allowing both the case and the counter-case to be iteratively improved.

The code behind Make The Case is Open Source.

They could even host some of the relevant bits of system software and web browser glue-ware.

It does already. Wikipedia uses the OGGHandler extension which tries to determine automagically what method for displaying video the client supports. It supports attempting to use the following clients:

• Cortado (bundled Java applet)
• VLC
• QuickTime with XiphQT
• Totem
• Kaffeine
• KMPlayer
• (ko)GomAudio

And then some more generic support for other cases

> Wikipedia. With all the inherent problems of self-proclaimed authorities who don't know what they're talking about ..

Wikipedia isn't an open source project, it's an online collaborative encyclopedia. Mediawiki on the other hand is the software project that powers Wikipedia.

Yeah, but using Mediawiki for read-only content is not the smartest thing to do, it prohibits caching.
If Mediawiki would allow proxies to cache their content (maybe there is a plugin, but Wikipedia doesn't allow it either), a lot of trouble would go away. And does Wikileaks need uncached requests? No.

I am not talking about (web) server-side improvements, I am talking about the problematic 'Cache-Control: private, s-maxage=0, max-age=0, must-revalidate' HTTP header. HTTP caching is so misunderstood. http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/#WHY

Of course you can mix it with...

This is how far I came in my quick rebuttal of your statement, before actually investigating the matter. After spending two hours doing that, I have come to the conclusion that you are absolutely correct, sir! Turns out, there is no formal definition of the MediaWiki syntax - it's just a number of regular expressions, and the implementation is the de facto standard.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor#State_of_WYSIWYG_and_MediaWiki_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki#Limitations

That's too bad, but they seem to be doing work to standardize that, and then it's just a matter of time before in-page editing. Of course, full browser support for MathML and SVG would also be great.

Yes, they use http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TorBlock. There is a client-side bot that blocks open proxies as well.

Information in most of the medical records is unstructured. I believe http://www.mediawiki.org/ is right solution for unstructured information instead of multi-million dollar solutions vendors are offering.

However, the one time I attempted to do this, the process was so incomprhensible that it took me thirty minutes to figure out how where to submit the photo, how to submit the photo, and which one of twleve different copyrights was appropriate. Then it took the same amount of time to figure out how to go about replacing a photo in an article with the one I submitted.

And I am a computer programmer. I can't imagine someone who does photography for a living would have an easier time.

Yes, the upload interface is even worse than the rest of the MediaWiki interface. However, literally a week ago a totally revamped upload system was committed. If all goes well, Wikipedia should be using it within, say, a month. It's supposed to be much better, although I haven't tried it myself.

(The commit might still be reverted, as a giant branch merge that broke a bunch of things. But since it's had a few dozen follow-up commits that would also all have to be untangled, it would probably be less effort to fix whatever brokenness is left at this point. :D It will probably delay the next sync of Wikipedia's code, though.)

Check out the Media Wiki API
Here's a detailed howto on creating a Bot.

...that the software they need is here MediaWiki

Why not http://www.mediawiki.org/

Yes, they're using the extension TorBlock to do this.

On April 11 around 11:50 (all times EST) I noted yet another spammer, so I deleted and blocked him as usual. But there was something a bit unusual - the current asshole was actually nicer than usual and left an explanation URL, http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/. So I went there and used some deductive reasoning to figure out the spammer's email address, and at 11:59 I sent him a one-line message:

Don't you ever spam my site again, asshole.

At 12:56 I got a response:

Thanks for writing. We're sorry if caused you any inconveniences, but be assured that this is strictly a research project. Could you please give us the domain name of the site in question, so that we can disable it in the system?

Might I also suggest that you enable MediaWiki's anti-spam features?

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Anti-spam_features

Our system currently skips sites if we see a CAPTCHA. The simple "puzzle" anti-spam feature is useless; we broke that with 5 lines of Python.

To this I wrote back at 13:20:

A stupid research project indeed.

You took a habit of shitting on people's front lawn leaving a note "I will not clean up after me, but if you clean up for me and send me an email with your address, I will try not to shit on your lawn again, and besides, all front lawns should be fenced". And just to be even nicer, you didn't bother supplying your email address (I had to guess yours, from your URL). For your own benefit, you can only hope you didn't shit on the front lawn of anyone you really care about or will care about later on.

It will be best if you stop your project altogether, but at least, grep your files and remove anything that has "drorbn" or "katlas" from them.

I got no response and next I heard of this was on slashdot.

mediawiki + Tex extension. We use it at work and its just great. Along with some graphiz support for, well, graphs!

mediawiki + Tex extension. We use it at work and its just great. Along with some graphiz support for, well, graphs!

There aren't many reasons on a single-user desktop

Who says a desktop is single-user? See: NComputing.

for MySQL to be necessary over SQLite

SQLite, for one, doesn't enforce foreign key constraints. MySQL with InnoDB tables does. And has, say, MediaWiki been ported from MySQL to SQLite for things like a personal wiki on a USB drive?

With that in mind, you should focus on how to provide the highest value IT services for your University. That means building a business case around any changes that you proposed, including the upfront and ongoing costs of transition, training, and support. As many others have noted, "free" software isn't free.

Your University has thousands of users, including a broad diversity of stakeholders, including executive and administrative staff, faculty, and students. All of them expect to have systems up and running 24x7. Any lengthy downtime in a critical system must be avoided.

So what should you do?

• Recommend the formation of a University-wide task group to look at "future needs" and at potential cost-saving approaches. Make sure to include students. Bring in outsiders with expertise on open source software, including commercial open source solutions, e.g., Sun/MySQL and RedHat/JBoss. You can help to justify the need for a task force by mentioning the costs of moving everyone to Windows 7 next year.
• Make sure that one of the task force recommendations is to set up a server from which people can download various high quality open source software to try on their own mchines. That set can include many of the 25 packages that Palamida rated as enterprise-ready, along with Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
• Perform a census of existing open source software on your IT systems. You might be using a lot more open source software than anyone realizes.
• Put together a couple of demos or pilot projects. For example, you can bring up a working Drupal CMS or Mediawiki wiki within an hour, even less if you start with a preconfigured Bitnami stack. Anyone need a new web site right now?

Of course, there is no assurance that these methods will work, or that proprietary vendors won't try an end run around your efforts. But I've found these techniques to be an effective guerrilla marketing approach in the past. Good luck.

Okay:

MediaWiki
WordPress
Jabber
Zimbra ...

Get it?

This is about using open source software for internal, noncommercial, nonprofit purposes.

Wikipedia (MediaWiki) has a comparable feature already built in: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs .
It is entirely possible to link to a specific flagged and confirmed version of your favorite page by selecting the current version in the version history, then using that link instead of the more generic wikipedia.org/wiki/Bla.

This doesn't prevent further editing of your uploaded content, but you will be able to quote the article you want, not the article it might have become.

Sounds like Wiki may be the best... It is easy enough to split the document into sections, which can be edited concurrently. It keeps the history available. And the format is (almost) text.

Pick MediaWiki (the same software, that powers WikiPedia) or any other implementation (some may be easier to operate on a small LAN, and/or be able to export pure text, etc.)

The wiki software, MediaWiki, was written for Wikipedia and is licensed under the GPL ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_does_MediaWiki_work%3F. According to Wikipedia they use MySQL as their database and run it all on Linux servers.

All the Wikimedia wikis, including Wikipedia, provide a good public web-based API for querying the underlying database. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php.

It's not so hard to build a offline browser for mediawiki, since the foundation provides bz2-compressed xml-dumps.
I myself once wrote one for using with Apache+PHP (without a database or MediaWiki, e.g. for USB-sticks or laptops).

See
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

You actually missed one of the wiki* in this conflict. In particular, Wikileaks is reporting that the Wikimedia Foundation is suppressing a news item on Wikinews about Wikipedia.

It's also worth noting that all of the above sites are managed using the MediaWiki software.

FWIW, this is something we hope to address slightly with the Flagged Revisions extension - see quality.wikimedia.org. The idea is that casual readers (not logged in) see the last not-obviously-awful version, and only logged-in readers see the live working draft. This is due to roll out on the German Wikipedia some time soonishishish, and other wikis (including English Wikipedia) sometime maybe later ishishish.

That doesn't address warranting that information is quality-checked and fact-checked over 2 million articles. We've yet to come up with a method that scales other than the present one. The Flagged Revisions extension can be adapted to this end, but someone has to be willing to do the work toward this.

So far the least worst approach has been hand-picking and checking articles, which has resulted in Wikipedia 0.5 and the SOS Children Wikipedia Selection for Schools (an interesting one - they used Wikipedia as raw material for an educational encyclopedia in their own schools). But these give you thousands of articles instead of millions. And one of Wikipedia's real strengths is its incredible breadth.

There are benefits and drawbacks to either answer to the question "Should Wikipedia be funded using advertising?".

If yes, the Wikimedia Foundation would have a huge surge in revenue. Donations could play second fiddle to the advertising money that would allow the Foundation enough money to pursue whatever enterprise it wanted, such as launching regular print (or otherwise physical, I imagine Blu-Ray or DVD being ideal) editions of Wikipedia, hosting those Wikipedia Academy events worldwide, or hiring more programmers to improve the MediaWiki software (debugging FlaggedRevs would be high priority). There would be enough money that could buy servers just for the capacity to enable features currently disabled on Wikipedia because of the current lack thereof, like integrated spellcheck, suggestions for search, and dynamic hit counters. With what Wikipedia has achieved on a tiny budget of a few million dollars (consider this relative to Google's billions upon billions), it could achieve so much more if we were to ratchet up the budget by a few orders of magnitude.

On the other hand, advertising can be seen as fundamentally degrading to the content - regardless of whether it actually influences the content, it will influence how the content is seen - content presented with ads beside it is somehow different from content that is simply presented. Visual, intuitive measures of trustworthiness decline when content is accompanied by ads, because there is a sense that someone is doing this for a particular purpose, that there is some sort of corporate motive behind what is presented. Wikipedians who cannot abide advertising beside their work would leave and either fork the project or abandon it; the sense that one's unpaid work earns money for another is frustrating to someone even if that other is merely a beneficent organization seeking to perpetuate that work. The mere suggestion of advertising caused one fork already - should advertising be raised again, the split in the community might be devastating. There is a reason that Wikipedia calls its members "Wikipedians" - a demonym - rather than "Wikipedists" or "members": the community is essential to the maintenance of the resource as a whole, and as one of them (an admin), I certainly know this on a first-hand basis.

----

If no, the Foundation does maintain some risk of financial trouble - it is expensive merely to maintain the servers and pay for bandwidth, and the database is huge. The risk is of the free content winking out into the dark, to be perpetuated merely by mirrors and forks - many of which (illegally) try to claim that the content is their own and copyrighted (rather than the GFDL under which Wikipedia content is licensed). The key thing is that what's been created is available for anyone - if you have the bandwidth and the time, you can download the database and start your own fork.

It's not completely a doom & gloom scenario yet - the planned $4.6 million budget drawn up included plans for growth, not merely maintenance. By keeping to the baseline, the budget could be successfully slashed.

----

Overall, it's a bit of drama - while the publicity will certainly be good in that not many people seem to realize that Wikipedia runs on a shoestring budget - the site's relatively professional look and feel, not to mention the lack of ads, would seem to suggest that Wikipedia isn't worried about money, that someone runs the site and people don't have to care.

People do have to care, because ultimately Wikimedia needs a pile of those funny green (or multi-colour, here in Canada) things from your wallet to keep running, to serve up billions of pageviews, to keep a lawyer and an accountant on staff, and those other necessary things.

Personally, if advertising came to Wikipedia, I'd not worry - I know intuitively that it's not about the money, it's about keepin

We use MediaWiki http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki (same software used for Wikipedia) to document pretty much everything. It has been very helpful being able to update documentation as you go. One issue so far though is the wiki doesn't make it as easy as we would like to find what we are looking for so the organization or your documentation is important.

Rather than trying to document processes, set up an information repository that staff can draw on to do their jobs.

In our organisation we run a wiki on the intranet. Initially I thought we would document processes and I tried to kick start things and encouraged others to contribute. Things turned out a bit differently to what I thought we wanted in the beginning. The Wiki is now a general purpose, knowledge and information repository rather than some procedure manual. IMO, it is much more valuable than any procedure manual could be. Combined with good search functionality, if your looking to get something done, that has been done before, chances are there'll be some articles in the wiki about it.

What I'm getting at I guess is get a Wiki up and running and get the ball rolling with some useful information in there, e.g. letter templates, supplier contacts, whatever is relevant to your organisation. Staff will naturally use it if it means they need to remember less or explain things less often to their colleagues.