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It's all in the attitude and presentation to the public. He certainly acts like there is a moral obligation for companies to give him money. It's also not clear where all the money will go to. Checks are to be made to Theo personally. I can't tell, is there a charitable organization behind OpenBSD? If so, then they need to run it like one. If not, then Theo has no right to act like one.

Now compare this to Wikipedia. There's none of this "you owe us" business. There's a very transparent budget and list of contributions. And there's a non-profit organization behind it all.

The 1,000,004th article was my article on Cellular architecture. Damn! Oh well, at least I got to post the press release.

If we /. the wikimedia servers, we can start another fund drive! Who wants to hear another personal appeal from Jimbo?

When I decry public funding of science, I'm blasted because people say that the free market won't pay for certain research. Now I see a more evil side of it -- and I fear that we'll see more investigations like this if I'm right. What can we do to combat humanity's deep need for self preservation in a scientist having the same human drives, especially when it is funded straight out of our pocket involuntarily?

There can be two sides to this issue.

1. If the research is funded with government money, it can be influenced by politics.
2. If the research is funded with private money, it can be influenced by its investors.

Think of it like a global warming research sponsored by a congressman who is lobbied by an oil company vs a TCO of Windows vs Linux research sponsored by Microsoft.

Both could have potential bias and complications.

Personally, I believe both private and public research can be beneficial. Take DARPA for example. I for one believe DARPA is the shining example of public research gone right. It is backed by public money, but often uses the private sector as a major part of its research. Take the recent Grand Challenge for example.

So I think there is a place for public funding at least to get the ground work. After all, the Manhattan and Apollo Project were publicly funded.

However, if you believe government funded projects are a waste of your tax money, then you can do what I do... Donate to a private non-profit research group that is tax deductible. I realized if I donate enough money to either Wikipedia or the Singularity Institute I could just write off all my taxes next year. Even though I don't get more money than I would have not donating, it means the IRS will have to give me a larger refund, hence putting my money where I want it to go and not where a congressman does.

Transparency is not modesty.

If you read the Appeal for Donations, Wales specifically believes that Wikipedia has the potential to change the world by providing education to people who may need education. Implicity in that belief is that Wikipedia will be accurate enough to be a resource useful for that.

I always hate to knock Wikipedia, because I really do think it's an interesting experiment, but it has very serious flaws. It's biggest flaw is a "Tyranny of Those With The Most Time." There have been a couple of cases where I've tried to make some changes to a particular article that I knew were accurate, but I got some a-hole, who believed they owned the page, reversing my changes because they disagreed with them. Who has time to fight that battle? Apparently the a-hole does, but I certainly don't.

Paypal is NOT a bank. There is tremendous risk in storing such large amounts of capital in Paypal, as the company could go broke or hiccup or otherwise wipe out the balance. Because Paypal is not a bank, AFAIK there is no insurance on deposits there (no FDIC insurance).

This is never a concern for us people storing a few hundred dollars there, but this is too much money to put at risk. For safety sake, Wikimedia should diversify and hold more cash in real, government insured bank accounts or bonds.

I'm not saying this because I think Paypal is a scam or anything, but the cash must be held somewhere safer and preferably where it earns interest. Wikimedia could easily negotiate high interest savings with a real bank and collect $8k or more a year from interest alone.

Wikipedia is a registered 501 (c) 3 public charity. There is no owner. Even if there were an owner, it could not be sold or transferred for a profit. If the organization were to be liquidated, the assets would have to be transferred to another 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization.

Mr. Wales will not be making any money off of your donations. If he makes any money from Wikipedia at all, it will be from speaking engagements or other jobs for which he is paid a premium on account of his experience.

You can view Wikipedia's budget on their publicly available budget page. Two thirds of the budget goes towards hosting expenses mostly to support the 100 servers that take more page hits than all but 30 other web sites in the entire world. Of the hosting expenses, most of it went towards new hardware to speed up the site as it used to be incredibly slow.

The next largest expense is for the four employees (two full-time, two part-time). Most of the other expenses are administrative including the cost of transferring donations across international boundaries (judging from your American attitude that won't be an issue for your donation), keeping their trademarks registered, founding chapters throughout the world, and finally, building up some reserve funds so they can deal with emergency expenses.

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.

Throughout all this low turnout, I've seen many methods administrators used to entice people to donate. First, they tried using no bar graph and had no set fundraiser goal on their donations page, unlike their past fundraisers. As an administrator explained to me, after a goal has been met, people feel less obligated to donate, feeling Wikimedia will be alright on its own after that, with the same feeling being evoked from a viewing of a mostly filled bar graph.

I explained to them that with me, and most people I've talked to, seeing a bar graph that has not reached its goal adds more incentive for people to donate and help fill it up, but to know visible avail. About two days later, they had begun using the bar graph on their donations page, but without a goal. Within a week, they had put the bar graph on top of every page, with a daily report, as never done before. I asked in #wikipedia on the Freenode server, and they explained they planned to empty the bar graph after it becomes full. If you observe the bar graph they've put on every page, you'll seen it's divided into $100,000 segments, with a full graph being $500,000.

I do not think it would be wise to empty out the bar graph after it fills up. People would be very disappointed to see it be emptied, going back to the beginning, leaving a feeling of being deceived inside. Silly, yes, to be concerned over a graphic like that, but I believe people are silly like that. I hope when they empty it and begin to refill it, they at least use a different color for a "progress" feeling. Yellow, then orange, then red, then purple.

The personal appeal, though, is the most effective "marketing" tactic they've used. Wikipedia just can't survive for long unless they get those donations. Most Wikipedia users would rather have Wikipedia die than see a banner ad anywhere on Wikipedia, as would I. People would not want to contribute, they would think, to put money in the pockets of Wikipedia's sponsors. AdSense would not work either, because to have a campaign ad or political mudslinging brought up when you look up John Kerry or George W. Bush is just plain wrong for an encyclopedia. The closest Wikipedia has ever come to advertising, or even proposing advertising, is the Answers.com scandal. You see how well that turned out!

Some people have been concerned about the budget and how things are being spent. As my fellow Wikipedia editor, Brian, has pointed out, there is a link to the quarterly budget at the top of every page. It is here if you can't find it.

Please mod me and all parents up. For Wikipedia.

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.

Really?

From: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Finance_report

You have around 16500 dollars in travel expenses. Do your servers need a regular vacation in the Bahamas? Or was that for Jimmy Wales?

"Why would a community collaborative project such as Wikipedia even need sponsorship, other than bandwidth fees?" - see for yourself. Wikimedia has spent roughly $400,000 dollars on hardware this year alone (the inevitable downside of having your traffic double every 4 months). Hosting adds roughly another $100,000 per year to the costs. And that's not counting the tons of other actual expenses that a real life charity (as opposed to some person's hobby on sourceforge) has to deal with - legal fees, banking fees, office supplies. So please check your facts before spreading FUD.

The money is for:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005
Hardware (they have dozens of caches, apache servers, and DB slaves)
~$100,000 a year hosting
~$132,000 a year to pay for 2 full-time and 2 part-time employees
~$30,000 a year legal expenses...

There's some serious money needs.

If you look at the budget, you'll see that the purchase of servers is the biggest line-item.

What a lie. Check the 2005 budget for yourself. There are four employees (two full time - Jimbo's assistant and Wikimedia's chief developer and two part time - a coordinator for the International Wikimedia meetup and an intern to help physically maintence the servers). Notice, Jimbo isn't one of them.
 
As to travel, the entire 2005 budget was $17,000. For comparison purposes, Wikimedia speds roughly the same amount on office supplies. Are they using too much paper too?

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, as Mr. Wales certainly still puts out money towards the project. The main issue is adding servers to our collection, and paying our two full time employees and one contractee (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings) to keep everything running perfectly. Nick Moreau Canadian press contact Wikimedia Foundation

Running a read-only site would be much easier, we could do that with much smaller budget. What money is spent for - supporting collaboration infrastructure. We're running on 100 servers now, all quite cheap and efficient. We're pumping out 500mbps of information now, but we're still doing that low budget. But it all needs to grow and scale, and though software is doing that quite well, resources are needed.

This is very low-budget operation, comparing to other huge sites. There's no corporate funding, no huge revenue streams. I've seen sites running with same budgets but only 1% of Wikipedia's load. A donation made will go into collaboration infrastructure, rather than being forgotten forever. A donation made may allow thousands of articles to be created, extended and viewed. There is a price for information, but you won't find lower margins ;-)

In an apparent reply to the low turnout for their fourth quarter fundraiser

Only $160,000 was available at the start of the quarter, creating a budget shortfall of $161,200. A fund drive starting on 1 December was scheduled at the meeting as well. --Daniel Mayer 18:18, 1 October 2005

First quarter fund raising earned a miniscule $96,648.70 and if they did as well (surpassing their goal by 25%) every quarter, they'd still be $352,605.20 shy of the 2005 budget.

True, but if instead of citing the Q1 fund drive you'd cited the more recent Q3 fund drive, you would have reported a rather more upbeat $243,930 USD. If they did as well every quarter, they would have $975,720 -- 32% over what they are budgeted to spend.

Given that the Q1 fundraising came in 25% over target (target $75,000) and the Q3 fundraising came in 22% over target (target $200,000) and the foundation didn't feel the need to run any Q2 fundraising, I don't think they're exactly about to declare themselves bankrupt.

I'll admit the servers get a little on the slow side at times, though....

Michael

Despite the figures you quote, the Wikimedia talk page on this subject has a quote from Angela (who is on the Board of trustees). There, she specifically says:

No, it wasn't necessitated by the budget. I am expecting the revenue would be regarded as something additional to what is needed to keep the site running. For example, special projects like the distribution of content in Africa and so on.

Thus, this money isn't needed to cover servers and bandwidth. So far, donations have been enough for that, and they expect this to continue in the future. This extra money is ... well... extra...

There's regular fund drives for their hardware costs anyway (not sure if bandwidth is included), and these have so far been more than successful. Wikipedia also have some sort of deal with both Google and Yahoo! to relieve them of some hardware and bandwidth needs.

Not sure about the administrator payment -- I assumed this was a group of volunteers such as a large bulk of e.g. Mozilla developers?

And no, Wikipedia definitely has no profit motive, that's why the creator started it, and why I think it has been so successful -- they simply state that "The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a non-profit organization with the goal of providing free knowledge to every person in the world. Meeting this goal through the maintenance, development and distribution of free content, Wikimedia relies on public donations to run its wiki-based projects."

According to the Wikimedia Foundation's budget, the vast majority of funds (around 60%) received goes towards purchasing new hardware for hosting.

Chris

"Previously, the site was hosted on the servers of Bomis, Inc, a company mostly owned by Jimmy Wales, who is currently the funder of part of the site's operational costs."

"Previously, the site was hosted on the servers of Bomis, Inc, a company mostly owned by Jimmy Wales, who is currently the funder of part of the site's operational costs."

I think that Wikipedia is a great service. The people behind it should be compensated for time, effort, hardware and bandwidth. I have no problem with advertisements to fund this. I mean, it is better than paying for a subscription!

Yours is a comment that is unaware of the following:

Six servers are now being hosted in France as squids, with another eleven in the Netherlands, and a further 23 in South Korea donated by Yahoo. The hosting and bandwidth have been donated. About Wikimedia (Emphasis mine). They clearly note that hardware is the major expense and that they only have two people on staff. When you say people behind it don't forget all the volunteers that don't even get a cent from the project and the efforts and countless hours they pour in for the community. Monetary incentive shouldn't be assumed.

Also note that this is still quite shortly after Wikimedia has received very close to $200,000 in donations and that this announcement is just over a month after the drive I would question exactly what was the purpose if the drive. Articles still exist on Wikimedia that state the following For the time being, we want the Wikimedia projects to remain free of advertisements. About Wikimedia.

Before anyone goes over-board either way please remember the content posted on Wikipedia, something like this can get blown way out of proportion, The prominence of any links to the service on Wikipedia will be left entirely up to the community. This is not a pay-for-placement deal. This respect for the community is absolutely insisted upon by both Bob Rosenschein of Answers.com and Jimbo Wales. 1-Click Answers. Let's just wait and see if this is left up entirely to the community.

I think that Wikipedia is a great service. The people behind it should be compensated for time, effort, hardware and bandwidth. I have no problem with advertisements to fund this. I mean, it is better than paying for a subscription!

Yours is a comment that is unaware of the following:

Six servers are now being hosted in France as squids, with another eleven in the Netherlands, and a further 23 in South Korea donated by Yahoo. The hosting and bandwidth have been donated. About Wikimedia (Emphasis mine). They clearly note that hardware is the major expense and that they only have two people on staff. When you say people behind it don't forget all the volunteers that don't even get a cent from the project and the efforts and countless hours they pour in for the community. Monetary incentive shouldn't be assumed.

Also note that this is still quite shortly after Wikimedia has received very close to $200,000 in donations and that this announcement is just over a month after the drive I would question exactly what was the purpose if the drive. Articles still exist on Wikimedia that state the following For the time being, we want the Wikimedia projects to remain free of advertisements. About Wikimedia.

Before anyone goes over-board either way please remember the content posted on Wikipedia, something like this can get blown way out of proportion, The prominence of any links to the service on Wikipedia will be left entirely up to the community. This is not a pay-for-placement deal. This respect for the community is absolutely insisted upon by both Bob Rosenschein of Answers.com and Jimbo Wales. 1-Click Answers. Let's just wait and see if this is left up entirely to the community.

I think that Wikipedia is a great service. The people behind it should be compensated for time, effort, hardware and bandwidth. I have no problem with advertisements to fund this. I mean, it is better than paying for a subscription!

Yours is a comment that is unaware of the following:

Six servers are now being hosted in France as squids, with another eleven in the Netherlands, and a further 23 in South Korea donated by Yahoo. The hosting and bandwidth have been donated. About Wikimedia (Emphasis mine). They clearly note that hardware is the major expense and that they only have two people on staff. When you say people behind it don't forget all the volunteers that don't even get a cent from the project and the efforts and countless hours they pour in for the community. Monetary incentive shouldn't be assumed.

Also note that this is still quite shortly after Wikimedia has received very close to $200,000 in donations and that this announcement is just over a month after the drive I would question exactly what was the purpose if the drive. Articles still exist on Wikimedia that state the following For the time being, we want the Wikimedia projects to remain free of advertisements. About Wikimedia.

Before anyone goes over-board either way please remember the content posted on Wikipedia, something like this can get blown way out of proportion, The prominence of any links to the service on Wikipedia will be left entirely up to the community. This is not a pay-for-placement deal. This respect for the community is absolutely insisted upon by both Bob Rosenschein of Answers.com and Jimbo Wales. 1-Click Answers. Let's just wait and see if this is left up entirely to the community.

This comment is simply untrue. Both Google and Yahoo have offered to host Wikipedia content without requiring advertising. Also, your claim that Jimmy Wales pays for Wikipedia hosting is untrue too. In the latest fundraising drive, over $200,000 was raised. This is how they pay for hosting.

This comment is simply untrue. Both Google and Yahoo have offered to host Wikipedia content without requiring advertising. Also, your claim that Jimmy Wales pays for Wikipedia hosting is untrue too. In the latest fundraising drive, over $200,000 was raised. This is how they pay for hosting.

There was an article here not too long ago about an interview with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. In the interview, he mentions how Wikipedia actually only has one employee - a software developer. The majority of Wikipedia is kept running smoothly by volunteers. And they do use fundraising to earn money, but instead of a big banner, all they have is a small "Donations" link at the bottom of the navigation box.

No, Wikicities does not run on Wikimedia servers. Wikicities is not a Wikimedia project. Wikicities and Uncyclopedia are managed by Wikia, a for-profit company, whereas Wikimedia, though run by some of the same people, is a non-profit organization that relies on grants and donations rather than Google ads.

I always thought Wikicities ran on Wikimedia servers.

Other than adds, what else could fund 'free' services online?

I don't know but I think wiki Foundation has an answer. You could also read up on what the asterisk next to peoples name means - you'll discover many a few ways online can survive. If they're good enough, they will, if not then that is the free market speaking.

Wikipedia is great & the webapp that it runs on is fantastic. I would like to donate money to the developers (see my URL). I know that I can support Wikimedia Foundation, but was wondering if anyone knew how much of my donation would actually go to development.

Open Sources was a fantastic book, which is available for free from O'Reilly. I enjoyed it & bought a copy even after I read it on my PDA. I eagerly anticipate the second. Does anyone know when it will come out and if it will also be available for free?

While MediaWiki (and other projects) are a snap to setup, The Wiki Way offers an interesting perspective & some good advice.

people get paid while continuing to give you their stuff for free

Am I the only one here whose brain hurts from this post? I doubt the DVD itself es gratis but the 'net version is obviously free. Besides, we can always donate (though obviously sans the DVD incentive).

If you own content that might be useful to Wikipedia or the other Wikimedia projects, such as holidy photos from a far-away country, please upload it to the Commons. If you don't want to learn the ways of the wiki, you can use the newly created (free) file upload service, where Wikimedia volunteers will tag and upload your files for you. The only condition is that you put them under a free license or in the public domain.

Remember, all the Wikimedia projects are run by a non-profit organization that depends on donations from people like you.

If you own content that might be useful to Wikipedia or the other Wikimedia projects, such as holidy photos from a far-away country, please upload it to the Commons. If you don't want to learn the ways of the wiki, you can use the newly created (free) file upload service, where Wikimedia volunteers will tag and upload your files for you. The only condition is that you put them under a free license or in the public domain.

Remember, all the Wikimedia projects are run by a non-profit organization that depends on donations from people like you.

I totally support websites that want to charge for content. Why? 'Cause I think ads are annoying and favor least-common-denomenator content like stupid network TV sitcoms and vacuous teeniebopper bands.

None of the currently used methods to charge for content are viable because the cost of making the transaction is too high -- either to the user (filling out forms etc) or to the seller (paying 50 cents to process a payment of 50 cents).

So far, free content and donations seems to be the best compromise. I'd love to compare Wikipedia's donations to Britannica's revenue over the past year.

So, here's a thought:

Let's say you subscribe to a payment service which issues you some kind of universal user-id. You put in your info once at the payment service's site. Each pay content site would require you to sign on with your universal user-id. Your total surfing costs would be totalled and billed to you once a quarter or so. The revenue would be divided among the content sites based on total traffic statistics for all users of the payment service.

Essentially, this amounts to aggregating payments rather than aggregating content.

The big drawback I can see is the cost of securing such a system. Anyway, I guess this is not that different than micropayments, except that the payments are aggregated to save on txn costs.

Oh well, I guess we'll just have to watch ads for crappy block-buster movies or useless James Bond cigarette-lighter-cameras or something.

A lot of people called dvorak stupid because they didn't understand his last article, on Google co-opting Wikipedia. That's because the /. story linked to page 2 and with only the tiniest clue that it wasn't the start of the article people just didn't get it. Please re-read it from the start before diss'ing him (and contribute to wikipedia's fund-raising drive).

Having a free, open-source virtual machine means you can easily copy songs from napster or any other source regardless of DRM. It should be trivial to patch the sound blaster emulation to start dumping to disk when the sound starts and stop once the device is closed or the sound pauses for 1 sec or so. This would make it trivial to copy napster songs regardless of what they do to lock down Windows itself, and it requires almost no work on the part of the user (they just play the song in a qemu-xp and it's saved as qemu###.wav... it would be a bit more difficult to automatically get the song name). But no manual starting/stoping of the recording is needed.

Ultimately this will be used to justify locking the system down at the hardware level with a verification key of some sort (aka paladium or whatever). If the BIOS has a private key and the OS includes the public key then it can encrypt something only the real bios can decrypt, so a virtual pc will need to either have the private key or be able to fake the OS. But ultimately the OS depends on the processor and system to be "honest" so the only way to prevent a QEMU from tricking the OS is to prevent it from running at all (the actual OS must prevent arbitrary programs from running).

I suppose locking up the computer so only offical, blessed software can run so that megacorps can deny us fair-use rights is called progress. But until then I'll continue to donate to wikipedia (so we know) and add more GPL code to the world (so we can do something about it).

granted you can get access to the code, content AND have the ability to use the information. But your forgetting the costs associated with hosting and running hardware.

Wikipedia is reliant on Noblesse Oblige. Looking at the Wikipedia Foundation Inc is set up as a non profit organisation and according to its benefactors page is actively seeking funds to operate and expand.

The Wikipedia foundations agenda for wikipedia is ambitous.

• '... maintain and develop free content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. ...' [
• Goals of foundation]

To execute these objectives require fundraising of some sorts. The question I ask is if wikipedia does a deal with google in line with their aims will google try to use this ready made information source to generate revenue? And what steps will they take to avoid *non-payers* accessing wikipedia - hence the reference to the *commons*. The advantage wikipedia has over say the news groups or the domain registration is they have a voice (wikipedia foundation) and a solid license (gpl release of software and data).

So yes you can take the code and data but delivering the wikipedia service is another matter.

granted you can get access to the code, content AND have the ability to use the information. But your forgetting the costs associated with hosting and running hardware.

Wikipedia is reliant on Noblesse Oblige. Looking at the Wikipedia Foundation Inc is set up as a non profit organisation and according to its benefactors page is actively seeking funds to operate and expand.

The Wikipedia foundations agenda for wikipedia is ambitous.

• '... maintain and develop free content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. ...' [
• Goals of foundation]

To execute these objectives require fundraising of some sorts. The question I ask is if wikipedia does a deal with google in line with their aims will google try to use this ready made information source to generate revenue? And what steps will they take to avoid *non-payers* accessing wikipedia - hence the reference to the *commons*. The advantage wikipedia has over say the news groups or the domain registration is they have a voice (wikipedia foundation) and a solid license (gpl release of software and data).

So yes you can take the code and data but delivering the wikipedia service is another matter.

granted you can get access to the code, content AND have the ability to use the information. But your forgetting the costs associated with hosting and running hardware.

Wikipedia is reliant on Noblesse Oblige. Looking at the Wikipedia Foundation Inc is set up as a non profit organisation and according to its benefactors page is actively seeking funds to operate and expand.

The Wikipedia foundations agenda for wikipedia is ambitous.

• '... maintain and develop free content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge. ...' [
• Goals of foundation]

To execute these objectives require fundraising of some sorts. The question I ask is if wikipedia does a deal with google in line with their aims will google try to use this ready made information source to generate revenue? And what steps will they take to avoid *non-payers* accessing wikipedia - hence the reference to the *commons*. The advantage wikipedia has over say the news groups or the domain registration is they have a voice (wikipedia foundation) and a solid license (gpl release of software and data).

So yes you can take the code and data but delivering the wikipedia service is another matter.

While I don't speak for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, I am a regular follower and poster of the events on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list where this proposal has taken on a bit of urgancy.

The main point that needs to be looked at is the fact that Wikipedia has been experiencing some absolutely explosive growth in demand from people both trying to add articles, as well as people simply accessing it, like numerous cross-links to Wikipedia mentioned in various /. articles as well as references in news media. All of this crushing demand to view content (where Wikipedia could produce a slashdot effect on /. itself) is taking up bandwidth that simply requires money just to be able to serve up the content.

The current proposed budget for maintaining the servers is on the order of $130,000 and all of that comes from voluntary donations of the community. (BTW, please give some $$$ if you are a regular user of Wikipedia).

Google has quietly given an offer to not only co-locate some Wikimedia servers at their facilities, but also to pay for the servers themselves as part of the general Google server farm.

From what I've seen, nothing in the proposal is to have Google "take over" the Google content. Just like Google uses data in the Open Directory Project for their google website directory, they are free to use the content of Wikipedia as long as they comply with the terms of the Gnu Free Documentation License.

This is not a way to "lock up" the content, but rather a way to browse Wikipedia in a way where you can be assured that the bandwidth is available to view the content. Basically, a mirror of the Wikipedia project. This is not even a new idea.

I would imagine that the fine points of negotiation right now are that links to add content would be folded back into the main-line Wikipedia database. This is just like the Open Directory Project has been doing for a number of years, so the preceedence is definitely there, even for Google. I don't deny that there is a valid business rationale for Google to host Wikipedia, but don't read more into it than is there: Google offering to host Wikipedia content.

John Dvorak absolutely does not speak for the Wikimedia Foundation, or even as a member of the community in general, and his comments are just to inflame issues from an otherwise uninterested technology journalist just trying to improve the sales of the publications he works for. Having been through similar publicity flare-ups in the past with other "open source" groups, Mr. Dvorak is not showing behavior consistant with even mediocre journalists that would at least contact members of the community he is reporting about. He is just doing raw speculation and that is it.

This article is disingenuous and I hope that Dvorak gets taken to task for the comments that he has made. I also hope that people like him don't kill the good-faith proposal that frankly the Wikipedia could really use, nor "poison" the water of other potential offers to help out in relieving the crushing bandwidth needs of the Wikipedia and other related projects. It is articles like this that give journalists an awful name and destroy what is left of credibility to their profession.

And it appears most of the 'it has to be free' crowd don't want to be the ones to pay. if you haven't made a dontation to wikipedia, then you need to shut up.

It's always possible Google's just trying to do something nice

If only there was an incentive for being charitable... oh.

> As long as the most basic mechanisms of democracy work [...]

In a two-party system with an apathetical electorate?

(Wikipedia is a great resource. Please donate, I just did.)

Quoth the parent poster; "Still, it takes money to run such an amazing resource, and so they are running a fundraiser. The goal is to raise $50,000." why dont they use Google Adsense?

According to About Wikipedia, they do not wish to use advertisements. I read elsewhere (which I of course can't find now) that this is partly because they want to appear as unbiased as possible.

• .."why should I trust Wikipedia, it's written by random people"?
• .."there's been a successful experiment of inserting false information..."
• "the neutral point of view doesn't work"
• "it's just an encyclopedia .."

Please read this:

Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.

Article review

Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page which is in active use.

These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki, our free wiki software.

We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.

There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.

Neutrality

The Neutral Point of View is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.

There's Wikinfo, which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia and dKosopedia, which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.

We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database and get going.

It's more than an encyclopedia

The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates Wikip

Next time a celebrity is in town, take a photo and upload it here.