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find 400,000 images and videos on the internet that weren't porn? Now that really is an accomplishment.

Ok, it's funny. But a lot of images are new photographs taken for Wikipedia not previously found in internet.
There is a lot of fun in take photographs, but it's a lot better if they have a purpose.

When I travel for fun or for business I take my camera with me and take some photographs that I think can be interesting for Wikipedia. I have contributed to Barcelona or Josep Puig i Cadafalch in architecture from the city where I live. But I have also taken images from other cities (Tarragona, Santander, L'Ametlla de Mar).

So it's not a problem of where to find images on internet but of take new ones for Wikipedia.

find 400,000 images and videos on the internet that weren't porn? Now that really is an accomplishment.

Ok, it's funny. But a lot of images are new photographs taken for Wikipedia not previously found in internet.
There is a lot of fun in take photographs, but it's a lot better if they have a purpose.

When I travel for fun or for business I take my camera with me and take some photographs that I think can be interesting for Wikipedia. I have contributed to Barcelona or Josep Puig i Cadafalch in architecture from the city where I live. But I have also taken images from other cities (Tarragona, Santander, L'Ametlla de Mar).

So it's not a problem of where to find images on internet but of take new ones for Wikipedia.

find 400,000 images and videos on the internet that weren't porn? Now that really is an accomplishment.

Ok, it's funny. But a lot of images are new photographs taken for Wikipedia not previously found in internet.
There is a lot of fun in take photographs, but it's a lot better if they have a purpose.

When I travel for fun or for business I take my camera with me and take some photographs that I think can be interesting for Wikipedia. I have contributed to Barcelona or Josep Puig i Cadafalch in architecture from the city where I live. But I have also taken images from other cities (Tarragona, Santander, L'Ametlla de Mar).

So it's not a problem of where to find images on internet but of take new ones for Wikipedia.

find 400,000 images and videos on the internet that weren't porn? Now that really is an accomplishment.

Ok, it's funny. But a lot of images are new photographs taken for Wikipedia not previously found in internet.
There is a lot of fun in take photographs, but it's a lot better if they have a purpose.

When I travel for fun or for business I take my camera with me and take some photographs that I think can be interesting for Wikipedia. I have contributed to Barcelona or Josep Puig i Cadafalch in architecture from the city where I live. But I have also taken images from other cities (Tarragona, Santander, L'Ametlla de Mar).

So it's not a problem of where to find images on internet but of take new ones for Wikipedia.

find 400,000 images and videos on the internet that weren't porn? Now that really is an accomplishment.

Ok, it's funny. But a lot of images are new photographs taken for Wikipedia not previously found in internet.
There is a lot of fun in take photographs, but it's a lot better if they have a purpose.

When I travel for fun or for business I take my camera with me and take some photographs that I think can be interesting for Wikipedia. I have contributed to Barcelona or Josep Puig i Cadafalch in architecture from the city where I live. But I have also taken images from other cities (Tarragona, Santander, L'Ametlla de Mar).

So it's not a problem of where to find images on internet but of take new ones for Wikipedia.

The non-free files referred to are basically just all the project logos. All of them can be found here

The only other exception I can think of is the spoken version of GFDL, as absurdly enough, GFDL itself isn't GFDL compatible (modification isn't allowed)...

The non-free files referred to are basically just all the project logos. All of them can be found here

The only other exception I can think of is the spoken version of GFDL, as absurdly enough, GFDL itself isn't GFDL compatible (modification isn't allowed)...

400,000 files is very impressive achievement. I've only ever listed to sounds on Wikicommons a few times though; I don't think they are too useful.

Anyway, I think the following page is worth a visit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sunrise

Finally ! Free-as-in-speech bestiality : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Leda.jpg Now I can be a zealot AND a pervert. Although obviously I would have preferred a gnu or penguin to a swan.

Well, they actuall do have pron :) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_wo men

Wikis are being used increasingly as CMS-replacements, as they should, as working with a CMS is hugely unappealing. See the http://www.mono-project.com/ website for a reasonable beginning example. Another exciting use is as a simultaneous mostly free-form encyclopedia and structured knowledge base, database, or whatever. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki.

A few clarifications for the pedant in all of us: First, Wikipedia is under control of the Wikimedia Foundation these days, not just Jimmy Wales; second, the "German club" in question is actually the German chapter of the Wikimedia foundation and not just some totally random club. And yes- wikipedia.de remains down even as de.wikipedia.org remains up.

Just go here and download the database.

But still I don't see why calling Boris Floricic by his name, Boris Floricic, should be a crime! I mean, I've said Boris Floricic three times in this post, and I doubt I will only say Boris Floricic three times (Or four? I mean, Boris Floricic rolls off the tongue! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic! Boris Floricic!)

You can download database dumps and you can find some help with importing into a fresh Mediawiki installation. You can try Wikifilter for converting the dump data into HTML.

...meight be more useful: have a look.

This is a windmill.

This is a wind turbine (and apparently a small one at that).

Notice the difference?

This is a windmill.

This is a wind turbine (and apparently a small one at that).

Notice the difference?

I happen to agree with this theory of evolutionary predation fears. I think this could be used to explain all these 'hairy men' creatures that appear all over the world.

Up until about 200,000 years ago there were about 5 or 6 different apes running around alongside our direct ancestors. These guys were smart, and they could use spears. My guess is they had a lot of body hair.

My personal pet theory is that about 100,000, human beings began systematically exterminating all other groups of hominids besides their own. The only hominids crafty enough to escape the slaughter were other homo sapiens.

You can see this continue today. Any group of human beings that give themselves some kind of group identity hate those other guys -- that group next door -- and will try to kill all of them, given the opportunity. They also think of other groups of people as savage animals.

So anways, rewind 100,000 years ago. A hairless human hunter venturing out into the woods to track down lunch stood a good chance of being killed by some hairy spear-wielding apeman.

Fast forward to today. People are still catching glimpses of hairy apemen in the woods (Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, whatever). Not that those hairy apemen are still alive, but that it's better to be paranoid and *suspect* that a creaking branch or other ambiguous sensory data is a hairy apeman, rather than foolishly walking into a hairy ape-mans' spear. To this day, human groups view their neighbor groups as savage animals who they are probably better off getting rid of.

• Both companies were at one time the main producer of Unix workstations (Sun during the 90s, Apple today)
• OpenStep was the result of a collaboration of NeXT and Sun to create an object oriented API based on NeXTSTEP. It ran on NeXTs Mach/BSD OS and Solaris. After the NeXT takeover by Apple in 1996 OpenStep became what today is known as MacOS X, still running on Mach/BSD.
• Styling: Sun and Apple (and NeXT) released workstations in (almost) cubic (Sparcstation IPX, G4 Cube, NeXT Cube) and pizza box format (Sparcstation 20, Mac LC, NeXTstation)
• Their Unix based operating systems are open source
• Both are strong supporters of Java
• Both are based in California
• Both were founded in the context of Stanford university
• Both tried (and failed) to grab a larger peace of the desktop market
• Both were early integrators of network technology into their computers
• Both have been declared dead several times
• Both produced some of the first application servers (WebObjects, J2EE)

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

O RLY?

Hi, Mr. O'Reilly!

From the sounds of it, they already have more information than a toy e-meter reads, so maybe...

It goes both ways. Any wiki whose contents is licensed under the GFDL can be copy-n-pasted en masse to Wikipedia. And with interwiki links, wikis can be interlinked, so a specific wiki could, say, only copy out just the startrek stuff, and link back to the real-world wiki only when necessary. GFDL, it's great thing.

Well, they do have a lot of servers...

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers

But, despite considering it, I'm doubting that I'll be promoting your idea of publishing every receipt and donation to our board. I expect that that would be, roughly speaking, a half-time position, and that would be (and I'm handwaving here), a ten percent increase in expenditures, and I'm not convinced that's the best use of our resources.

As someone pointed out, the list of donations is already published on the site. http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/2005q4/index.php/ 2006-01-01/detail/ I'm sure that didn't take too many lines of code.

Now, as for the receipts, that's 5 minutes of work tops for each one. You would need to buy a hell of a lot of things to make that a half-time job. A 10% increase in expenditures? That's one expensive scanner you got there.

Of course they might need to further expand the server farm, but not for several millions.

Actually yes, if the current (exponential) growth in traffic continues, the hardware expenditure for 2007 will be several millions.

Correct list link: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Domain_names [further corrected]

Whoops, yes. That's what I get for not previewing my comments. :-)

That would be http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Domain_names

Correct list link:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Domain_Names

Some have insightfully pointed to distributed distribution. Some argue that it would be impossible or impractical...I disagree, in fact distributed distribution should be one of the primary efforts of wikipedia supporters. If the aim to truly free information they should go about thinking how they can de-contextualize it from the wikipedia-brand/ institution. To free information we must aim to maximize possibilities for non-coercive free association. To accomplish these goals within our capitalist context we must align with institutions that can concentrate power to the point of which it is beneficial to the collective, wikipedia is one such institution. But at the same time we should do this with an end goal of freeing the information from the context provider. To do this we should do some serious thinking about distributed distribution.

As many of the posters have identified non-profit institutions are vulnerable to corruption, coercion, capital mismanagement, government regulation etc. Free culture should aim to dismantle exclusive information distribution within its own institutions, in effect supporting wikipedia as something larger than its-self. We can already loudly applaud database dumps, the open source backend, and openness of the foundation, but let us not assume that wikipedia as a mediator of free information is the end goal because then we might be left with another Google when the potential of participatory culture is so much greater.

Note that that's not a budget, merely a proposed budget - given the significant short-fall in donation income, it will have to be scaled back somewhat (and another donation drive run quite soon). The reason the items aren't split down further is that the money hasn't been spent yet.

What is this "chapter startup" and why does it need two grand?

It's money to fund the start-up costs of the local chapters - legal costs, primarily, and capped at US$500 or so per chapter, IIRC; we currently have chapters in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Serbia and Montenegro, and are working on founding ones for Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Local chapters work locally as ground-roots organisations, and form tax-friendly donation conduits.

Where I do my shopping (GoDaddy) $1500 will buy me 167 domain names. How many does WikiMedia have/need?

The list of domains is quite extensive, which might give you some clue; also, remember that some TLDs and especially SLDs within CCTLDs are (significantly) more expensive than a bog-standard .com would.

I hope that this answers your questions.

Note that that's not a budget, merely a proposed budget - given the significant short-fall in donation income, it will have to be scaled back somewhat (and another donation drive run quite soon). The reason the items aren't split down further is that the money hasn't been spent yet.

What is this "chapter startup" and why does it need two grand?

It's money to fund the start-up costs of the local chapters - legal costs, primarily, and capped at US$500 or so per chapter, IIRC; we currently have chapters in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Serbia and Montenegro, and are working on founding ones for Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Local chapters work locally as ground-roots organisations, and form tax-friendly donation conduits.

Where I do my shopping (GoDaddy) $1500 will buy me 167 domain names. How many does WikiMedia have/need?

The list of domains is quite extensive, which might give you some clue; also, remember that some TLDs and especially SLDs within CCTLDs are (significantly) more expensive than a bog-standard .com would.

I hope that this answers your questions.

Where I do my shopping (GoDaddy) $1500 will buy me 167 domain names. How many does WikiMedia have/need?

I believe they have tried to buy wikipedia.xx for every single top level domain name. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Domain_names. They went nuts on domain names. It was relatively expensive (though not much compared to the rest of their budget).

Download Wikipedia: http://download.wikimedia.org/

They spent $320,000 on servers in 2005 and $84,000 in 2004.

You can check here whether your donation made it into their account.

1. What is this "chapter startup" and why does it need two grand?
2. Where I do my shopping (GoDaddy) $1500 will buy me 167 domain names. How many does WikiMedia have/need?

"Daniel Mayer, Wikimedia CFO, indicated he hoped it could raise at least US$500,000", so 200 is a low turnout. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-12-26/News_and_notes

Yes, and we (Wikipedians) get four times the traffic of February last year. -- http://noc.wikimedia.org/reqstats/reqstats-yearly. png

Why would a community collaborative project such as Wikipedia even need sponsorship, other than bandwidth fees? (And they don't go through $750K a year in bandwidth fees). There should be little or no administrative overhead, and I've never seen an advertisement for Wikipedia (and don't know a reason why I should expect to).

Buying servers. They get an unholy amount of traffic. As a theoretical (Fermi) example: look at how often Wikipedia is updated - everything on that page, as I look at it, is within the same minute. Try making two changes to an article in quick succession and see if you can get the changes to show up next to each other on recent changes. I counted about 119 changes at 12:52 PM Eastern today - that's about two changes per second.

And now consider that that's only changes - not pageviews, which will be several times more - and that's only from the English Wikipedia (which, although the largest, by no means dwarfs the other Wikipedias). And consider that Wikipedia is constantly growing, so it needs more servers periodically. If you've ever noticed it slow down over a month or so and then get back to normal, it's probably because they added one or two servers to their rotation.

Meta has a nice diagram of their hardware from last April - every pictogram in it represents one server. They have - and need - separate Apache/PHP servers, Squid (cache) servers, MySQL servers, load-balancing servers, etc.

If you want to see the exact numbers, the Wikimedia Foundation has a few budgets on their site, e.g., 2005 budget. They're using over a million dollars a year.

http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/2005q4/ Day-by-day you can see a serious shortfall until the "personal appeal" notice went up. Daniel Mayer (aka mav) wrote on one of the mailing lists that he hoped to raise $500,000.

This is not Wikipedia's fault, but whenever I try to access Wikipedia from Anonymouse, it says Wikipedia has blocked access from that very anonymizing gateway... hilarious. I really don't have time applying proxies or go throguh SSH accounts in the West. I think Wikipedia needs to start distribute its stuff in a decentralized fashion, letting others deliver the stuff through their pipes. And it also should have encryption enabled to circumvent the censorship in the filter regimes.

There are 50 changes a minute at peak times on the English Wikipedia - and peak times are a few hours every day.

Distributing "in a decentralized fashion" would not work. People must have the latest revision, otherwise when they press "edit" they will either get old text (think Lotus Notes) or be confused by a change.

Besides which, the database http://download.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/ is 13.1GiB, and that's compressed. And that's just the English Wikipedia, and without images.

Good luck distributing that. Add the encryption and... owch.

Wikipedia is one of the most heavily loaded sites on the internet (currently ranked #24). Apprently (for instance) they push hundreds of megabytes of data per second.

Servers are not cheap, and Wikimedia needs lots of them. They list 129 new servers in 2005. Looking at the hardware stats of these servers, they obviously cost many thousands of dollars each (can someone give me more accurate pricing?).

All of these things are not cheap. Also note that Wikipedia needs more server coordination that many other sites, because the content is dynamic and the database huge. If you're just looking up info, that's fine, the content can be mirrored across many different servers across the world. But when you edit material, there must be a way to propagate those changes quickly. In fact, those of us who edit Wikipedia know that it becomes much slower when you enter edit mode, since all such changes have to go through a central server (as I understand it), rather than just the "closest and faster" server available.

All of this to say that running Wikipedia is by no means cheap. Yes, they really do need that much money ($100,000/year for servers and bandwidth is pretty cheap when you realize how much they manage to accomplish with it). Hopefully the donations will always be enough to keep up with the demand for this content.

(P.S.: Yes, some of the servers they use were donated. These donations are also vital to the ongoing success of Wikimedia.)

Wikipedia is one of the most heavily loaded sites on the internet (currently ranked #24). Apprently (for instance) they push hundreds of megabytes of data per second.

Servers are not cheap, and Wikimedia needs lots of them. They list 129 new servers in 2005. Looking at the hardware stats of these servers, they obviously cost many thousands of dollars each (can someone give me more accurate pricing?).

All of these things are not cheap. Also note that Wikipedia needs more server coordination that many other sites, because the content is dynamic and the database huge. If you're just looking up info, that's fine, the content can be mirrored across many different servers across the world. But when you edit material, there must be a way to propagate those changes quickly. In fact, those of us who edit Wikipedia know that it becomes much slower when you enter edit mode, since all such changes have to go through a central server (as I understand it), rather than just the "closest and faster" server available.

All of this to say that running Wikipedia is by no means cheap. Yes, they really do need that much money ($100,000/year for servers and bandwidth is pretty cheap when you realize how much they manage to accomplish with it). Hopefully the donations will always be enough to keep up with the demand for this content.

(P.S.: Yes, some of the servers they use were donated. These donations are also vital to the ongoing success of Wikimedia.)

Every organization needs to promote itself, and Jimmy's speaking engagements at conferences help build the trust and understanding of Wikipedia by academics, etc. Also, I'm not entirely sure how much of his trips Wikipedia funds ... Nick Moreau Canadian press contact Wikimedia Foundation

You're a "press contact" for Wikimedia, and you're "not sure". Yeah, ok. It's just a coincidence Jimmy goes to all these conferences in Paris, London, Scandinavia, et cetera.

Wikimedia pays for all of Wales' travels, and everyone knows the Wikipedia "board of trustees" is a farce, with Jimmy Wales having two pocket votes (in addition to his own). When you donate to Wikimedia, you're not donating to wikimedia. You're donating to Jimmy Wales' personal vacation fund.

Just one thing to note - you're donating to the Wikimedia Foundation, not to Wikipedia.

You can find the working draft for the 2006 Q1 budget at Meta-Wiki http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_budget/20 06/Q1.

An elite few? I'm not sure in what parallel universe you're using Wikipedia, but last I checked (a few hours ago), it was still editable by anyone - you don't even have to create an account to do so.

Sure, there are semi-protected pages now, and you need an account that's (IIRC) 4 days old to edit those. Calling accounts that are older than 4 days "an elite few" is ridiculous.

Of course, there's regular protections as well, but those are either temporary, in which case they're not bad (pages get protected when there's edit wars, but arguably the "anyone can edit anything at any time" model didn't work at that point - the edit war is proof of that. So protecting a page for a day or two so people get their act together and talk about their differences is reasonable), or (in the very, very few cases where pages are permanently protected) they're affecting pages that have been the target of high-profile vandalism in the past. Would you like to go back to a world where the main page has to be checked every ten seconds to see if some clown inserted a goatse picture? I wouldn't.

All in all... if you're not happy with Wikipedia or the way it's handled, feel free to start your own. You can even use Wikipedia's data to get started - it's all on http://download.wikimedia.org. Maybe you'll come out on top in the end - who knows.

Until then, good luck guy.

Wikipedia is nothing more than a MMORPG disguising itself as an encyclopedia. It would get a lot more respect if it just owned up to what it really is, and cut out all the lofty, "bringing information to the masses" poseur BS. Jimmy Wales' only goal out of all of this is gratification of his ego (though the free travel, and a hefty salary doesn't hurt either).

Do they just want more money to fund the project, or are they actually in dire need?

They're not "in need". Jimmy Wales just wants to start drawing a huge salary, and continue traveling the world (at Wikimedia's expense, of course).

And, just for fun, the group created an anonymous surveillance system that uses face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of people whose images are recorded.

> They had female guards?

Of course!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3e/Inte l_-_Leap.jpg