Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Needs $20K
TaranRampersad writes "Wikipedia's server is crashing off and on, and Jimmy Wales has posted a letter requesting some assistance from anyone out there with a dollar burning a hole in their pocket. Let's face it, you really don't need that candybar anyway ..."
... because posting a hyperlink to it on slashdot's front page will do wonders for that server.
... um, no.
The attention for the money here is surely good but well, a slashdoting to a server having issues
I'm too cheap to donate, and I'm only 16 anyway...
But Wikipedia is a really good resource-- I've contributed to it myself.
SomethingAwful recently raised a lot of money in a short amount of time for some army people going to Iraq. Even Sharereactor.com, a great, um, edonkey search engine thingamjig, was able to raise more than $5,000 for a faster connection.
It's really interesting how much people donate online. If I had the money and the means, I'd donate to Wikipedia myself.
I think Wikipedia may be able to reach their goal. It appears to be popular enough to be able to raise the money....
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
I find that Funk & Wagnalls makes a pretty good encyclopedia set.
I have been pwned because my
The reason this post exists is related to the nature of the website in question, you gibbon! Have you been to wikipedia? You're the kind of Nimrod that gripes about paying taxes while he's driving down a government paved street eating a government subsidized hamburger. Crawl back into your bunker.
Are you a VF grad? Check out the VFMA Alumni Forums VFMA Alumni Forum
Wikipedia isnt just "some crappy website" it is the largest wiki in the world, containing more user edited articles than any other of its kind.
i have no doubt its users will front the money, and i wish wikipedia (and all wiki culture) luck.
i lost my nick (t4b00) so im a coward now...
Wikipedia is trying to offer information to help the community. I can't understand why the slashdot community doesn't want to help out a dying webserver, but wants to buy air bazookas over at thinkgeek.
Like Sweepstakes? Try out my service @ http://www.yourpowersweeps.com -- Free 21 day trial, no cc needed.
This isn't a business site. It's an open source encyclopedia. Check what it is before assuming they're in it just for the money.
... or we delete this big lump of information that you thought you were entering somewhere permanent.
Thanks, I have a Britannica CD, and two bound Britannica sets (a 1978 and an ancient 1906 in miniature volumes)
The Wiki things are cool in a way, but too filled with unqualified opinion.
A Good Intro to NetBS
A free online encyclopedia needs more than a total devotion by its maintainer. And this is not a crappy website.
or stop trolling
Oh, please, don't be such an asshole.
This money is going to a FREE project that anyone can contribute to. It's not going to a site with pop-ups and banner ads. It's a non-profit (as far as I know) resource for everyone.
It's only fair to pass the hat around. This isn't some company's or kid's project to fill their own pockets.
This isn't just "someone"'s website, it's "everyone's" resource. That's part of the whole wiki philosophy, isn't it?
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Problem: Your server hardware is failing due to a greater and greater amount of traffic, coupled with hardware defects.
/., effectively destroying anything that was left of the server iron. Claim it all on insurance.
....Profit!
Solution: Post your problem to
And of course:
Is it really free if you need to give them money to make there webserver function correctly?
Wikipidia is a great website, though! If I had $20,000 (or any money, for that matter) I would definitely donate to this organization.
Wikipedia contains a wealth of information on a myriad of subjects, nearly anything you can think of, and all the documents are covered under a GPL-like license. The information found there is very useful and in-depth. I can't count the times I've been aimlessly browsing the web for a certain piece of information, only to find it right away on Wikipedia (that is, assuming the site wasn't down, which seems to be quite frequent of late).
C'mon guys, let's help support this site, and the spirit of open source documents.
Let's face it, you really don't need that candybar anyway ...
Speak for yourself, asshole!
Mbabadu from Ethiopia
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Wikipedia isn't some slacker blog or camwhore site looking for a handout. They're a not for profit, charitable organization that provides a valuable resource to the internet community and they need funds to keep this resource available.
My server is crashing too, and I only want $10,000. Doesnt this sound like a better deal?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Giving money to wikipedia is, IMHO, more useful and a much better idea than giving 4000$ to the first guy that will port Mozilla on the Amiga platform.
But hey it's my own opinion mod me down if offtopic but no flame please.
Iraq: war to save the U
I recommend talking to CCCP.
I've had a few e-mail exchanges with the guys that run it, they really do answer
all inquiries and are very friendly. It's not $20k but maybe they can help out somehow.
Wikipedia isn't just some other site begging for money, and they aren't asking for money for their content (though it's worth something, certainly, it's free to all - and Free too, I think) - their load is so huge, they really need thousands of dollars for their servers. I'd rather give them my 10 bucks than deal with the unpleasant alternatives, like ads plastered everywhere, or seeing wikipedia go away.
What if it were slashdot that needed $20000 for new hardware for their servers? Would all of you donate the money? If you donated money, would that make Slashdot any less free?
OK, the servers are crashing because they can't distribute the load properly. Story asking for donations gets posted on Slashdot. Servers suffer a coronary.
I can't help but wonder if that 20k figure goes up after slashizens romp on Wiki.
The problem with something like this becomes an issues of whether or not one believes the guy for one, secondly many will think "Oh well such and such amount of people use it, and I know they'll send something so I won't" which translates to little money being sent. (that's for starters)
Now 20,000.00 is a lot of money for a 'server'.
e4500 w/8 400mhz cpu's 1gb ram under $1500.00 (15 hundred)
e3500 w/8 336mhz 4 gigs ram 72gb space... $2200.00
IBM AS/400 9406 820 with 2395 Processor, 1521 Interactive Card isn't even $20k
Sun CobaltRAQ 4i (10 UNITS) RAQ 4i 256MB 40GB NEW HD 7200ROM total? $5,500.00
What is it this guy is supposedly running for $20k certainly piques my curiousity, and I'm not trolling. Hell I'll send him $5.00 and I don't even use his product
MoFscker
Maybe instead of giving cash, donate some of your old SUNs, SGIs etc, and help building it on a distributed architecture with really deep redundancy, where each component by itself isn't very reliable, but all together form a really strong cluster?
Asking for money is always the easiest way, and because of the number of people asking (Just look at all those PayPal Donate banners!) the chance of success is nearly null. What about taking a different path?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Note that when Wikipedia is down, the mailing list subscription is affected, too.]
What is that about? You could just put a dedicated server in to handle the mailing list, a lowly 133mhz thing running Linux and the James mail server, cut it loose from the web servers, and be done with the mailing list side of things. Why are burdened web servers in a high profile place (read: liable for hacker attempts) also running the mail server?
the three servers that currently host all of Wikimedia's projects in all languages are simply not enough, especially as two of them have turned out to have hardware defects
Then return them! They have problems, that's the manufacturer's fault. Demand new ones.
Seriously, though, if I had any extra cash, I would donate, but no, I don't. Sorry, wiki people.
1. Post to slashdot asking for $20k 2. ??? 3. Profit!
To arrive at wikipedia, you have to go to: http://en.wikipedia.org
It's always hard to just request donations for a dollar sum as an open source project. I think they'd have much better luck requesting hosting/hardware donations. It's much easier for a corporation to donate hardware (they get to write off their cost retail even though the actual cost to them is far below that) than money.
When its just hosting needs, being able to massively farm out helps to. A lot of university groups look to help host a few different things. One group may not be able to satisfy all the needs but ten groups might.
Just my two cents...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Donations should be sent to
Wikimedia Foundation Inc.
3911 Harrisburg St. NE
St. Petersburg, FL 33703
Can't see any way to post the paypal links here.
Heck, wikipedia helped me pass my CSET exam for English. That certification entitled me to a US40K$ job which I'm enjoying today. It's free and it's a decent resource for the cash strapped info hungry. The best part is that if you see an error in your domain of knowledge you can fix it. :)
It's not modded "offtopic" yet, but would someone explain me why?
The nature of the site is irrelevant. If you can't support a free Encyclopedia, then don't do one. I appreciate the devotion, hard work and all, but we are in a country that requires money to survive. Crying for help is maybe going to give them enough money for the next server but what about the following one?
If you don't make money with what you are doing, either:
1. Be poor.
2. Give it up and find a job.
If you don't want option 1, then give it up. It might be nice and beautiful, but it is unsustainable.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Well said! Besides, who the hell wants a website that tells you how to make those turntable scratchy noises with your mouth anyways?
Hell, we hear enough of that shit from Will Smith and Justin Timberlake anyways...
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Maybe information does not want to be free.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Most of the other sites begging for donations may not be worth it, but I find Wikipedia to be a great web site. Whenever I need information, Google often points me to Wikipedia with succinct information and without too much garbage mixed in.
I think a small donation is fine, particularly for a good, informative non-profit site that doesn't have ads, pop-ups, etc.
You know, the people who think that donating is so awful is like leeching on a filesharing network-- in wikipedia's case, it's information and bandwidth, and the client does not even contain popups or banner ads.
If you want a fair and free resource for information, then why not donate if you feel like it? If you don't care about wikipedia and don't use it, that's fine. But if you use wikipedia often for information isn't it fair to give back a little if you're able to?
They aren't making you pay for an account there, you know...
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
I agree with you on the tax bashing (e.g. don't educate kids, just see what happens). However, I also agree with the first poster. I think there are too many businesses/sites pleading for cash outside of their bounds. No problem letting them ask on their own site....but if it starts going beyond their borders (domain) then it's not cool.
This is one of the few times I think a posted submission shouldn't have made it to the main page of Slashdot.
Why are there so many flames in this thread? Slashdotters are really showing a lot of hypocrisy here: we want everything to be open source and free, but when an open source project asks for a little help, we turn our backs on them. I'm sure we wouldn't see the same kind of comments if Linus Torvalds was asking for help.
Information isn't a living thing, don't try to personify it.
I don't see what you're point even is. It costs money to run wikipedia, if you want a free resource to continue running then donate if you have extra money.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
I found wikipedia had very limited use for me. Information on the very simple subjects was adequate, but most the writing was horribly amateurish and painfully biased. A decent quality encyclopedia is really not too much to pay for, like this.
It's party of life, some things succeed and some things fail. wikipedia is one of those ideas that should be left to die, unless it can turn out a way to sustain itself financially. Asking for handouts is only delaying the inevitable.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
Great attitude.
so I suggest all the OSS Programmers stop working right now and start selling their software for big money.
What would the world be coming to if information actually could be free! Imagine THAT.
Geez, let's hope the rest of the world never turns into the US "dog eats dog" kind of attitude.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Wikipedia.org is one of the sites I visit regularly to get info about all sorts of things, it's up there in my personal bar. /. posts a story about something not so familiar, you'll find +5 informative posts linking to Wikipedia.org.
Not only me, most of the time, when
I feel really sad to read the news, and even more, when I read the responses above.
Wikipedia.org has contributed a lot to the community for free, I guess it's not that bad to donate a few bucks, and save the site.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
My problem with "we need $xxx" pleas is that they inevitably lead to "we need $xxx+yyy" pleas after another 6 months when the next thing breaks. Donations are always a stopgap measure and aren't a substitute for a real company model -- be that business or otherwise. If advertising or merchandising is out (for ethical or whatever reasons), then they should be turning to foundations that can help with non-profit fundraising. Wikipedia is a real educational site with real user benefits and shouldn't have trouble coming up with sponsors.
That said, I'm an occasional visitor and I'm gonna go throw a few bucks their way... (but just this once)
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
You do know the IEEE 802.11b spec was written by a few hams?
No, it is flamebait because the holder of the opinion clearly has no grounds upon which to hold it. Moreover, the tone of the post does not speak of the thoughtfulness which you in your anonymity value so highly.
No statement is true, not even this one.
I think that the site deserves the $20k, even if its just for maintinance.
Does anyone have the details of what their system is architected like, what thet expected load is, and what hardware they want to buy? We don't even know if their problem is networking equipment, cpu power, disk speed, bandwidth, we have no idea about anything! This information is available nowhere and the link to get more information - the mailing list - tells you it's down.
Anyway, at the end of the day, if a community of people needs a service, and they themselves support that service, isn't that, by long-standing definition, a collective? Wouldn't it be more profitable for Wiki to call a spade a spade, call itself a collective, and get on with raising money from its community and providing them with the service?
Nobody is asking you to donate an entire $20k. Don't be ridiculous.
"If not enough people care"? Let's see if wikipedia meets its $20k goal, then we'll see how many care.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
I'm an independent web publisher producing 3 web sites that generate a fairly large amount of traffic. One thing that I've noticed is the surprise on people's faces when I describe details of my sites and how much they cost to operate in terms of hardware and backbone connection.
...
Most people are under the impression that it costs a lot of money to handle the physical requirements of high-traffic web sites. The surprise always comes when I tell them that it costs me less than $99 per month to operate the physical equipment... with 1TB allocated transfer on a REAL dedicated server at a colo.
My opinion is that most web operators either aren't resourceful enough, or simply overestimate the costs of operating a web site.
I don't know what WIKIpedia's web traffic looks like, but I tend to think that they could manage to solve their problems on much less than $20k for hardware. Perhaps they should share some info and take a few suggestions from other web operators.
Companies like UnitedColo offer really great service at unbeatable prices! For a couple hundred dollars per month, WIKI could easily go the rented/dedicated server approach rather than worry about building a custom server for the same job.
My $.02
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
/me donates remaining few dollars in his PayPal account....I'm 17. Even I know how useful wikipedia is.
I don't care if this is modded redundant. Hopefully it'll encourage people.
--<Mike>--
Have you read the HAM RADIO entry on Wikipedia? No? Well that would explain the general ignorant tone of your post then. Unfortunately that particular entry won't be accessible for some time as the database is down.
For those of you who don't know what this archaic device known as a HAM RADIO is, this is another reason why you should donate to help keep Wikipedia running. It really is the most complete encyclopedia in the world; if there's anything at all you'd like to know more about (from HAM RADIOS to SLASHDOT TROLLING PHENOMENA), chances are there is a Wikipedia article about it.
After all, do we really want to go back to this? "Remember me? I'm the kid who had to do a report on space"
This mightn't just apply to donations--it might mean that a web-hosting company gets a tax-break by donating otherwise unused bandwidth/server space to Wiki.
-- "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." -- HL Mencken
Actually, I kind of agree with the initial poster as lately, everyone seems to be asking for donations to keep their sites up and running.
I do however realise that it's a free ressource and all, but nonetheless, there are other ways to sustain a site, other then asking for donations.
If the product is viable, they can offer consulting for commercial installation, or they could offer a "premium" service where subscriber get access to a dedicated server, while the unwashed get to share whatever's left of the ressource.
But if you're going to come after me for my hard earned money, you better have something to give in exchange for it.
It's a cold way to look at it, but in this economic context, I'd rather spend on something other then someone else's website.
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
You don't seem to understand how big Wikipedia is. It was about to surpass Slashdot.org in terms of traffic a few months ago, and it probably has by now. Put this in the spectre of being a *wiki* & not simply an http terminal, having multi-gigabyte databases which are being constantly accessed & edited like hail hitting a hot tin roof, backup databases, upload servers, dozens of different language editions, and you may understand why they need big iron. They've got some pretty serious equipment already, but it simply isn't enough. In terms of bandwidth load and hardware load size put together in context, Wikipedia is probably a top 200 server on the internet.
So yes, they really do need that kind of stuff, unless you enjoy Wikipedia averaging being down one day out of 3 (which has been happening each time a ram stick burns out or a hdd fails, which is why it went down this time).
this has nothing to do with the GPL and everything to do with the cost of running a high load non profit web site.
Advanced users are users too!
They are already having hardware problems and now we have to Slashdot them. FOR SHAME!!!!
Blogzine
Umm, this is just a form of fundraising that a lot of groups use. Just look at PBS, while it might not be there only source of revenue, they do regularly ask for donations from their viewers.
Wiki isn't a pet project anymore. So many people have found it useful that it has expanded beyond the resources the backers can resonably provide. Therefore it is asking for voluntary donations to continue expanding.
Check the In the News section . Good source for background info when something happens around the world.
Help fight continental drift.
If advertising or merchandising is out (for ethical or whatever reasons), then they should be turning to foundations that can help with non-profit fundraising.
/. a "foundation" if it wants to be? (Seems from this post that it does want to be). I kind of hate to say this, but if you don't like the story, don't read it. Or at least don't threadcrap it.
/. readers that they shouldn't contribute personally and just wait for some "foundation" to take care of it.
May I ask why asking some larger organization, a "foundation" is better than asking everyone any way you can? And, isn't
Wikipedia is a real educational site with real user benefits and shouldn't have trouble coming up with sponsors.
Should and is seem to be diverging here. If it's so easy to get a foundation to kick in the cash, why don't you go do it for them? Should be no problem for you to complete in just a few hours. Right?
That said, I'm an occasional visitor and I'm gonna go throw a few bucks their way... (but just this once)
Great. Maybe you should stop using it as a resouce too (maybe one last time). Or at least STFU and stop trying to tell
everything in moderation
if wikipedia is helpful, as i know it to be, let adsense raise sustained revenue for it. trust a former commie subject, capitalism is fairer.
Or alternatively, they could find a way to distribute their content.
I'm sure there's a good answer, but why don't groups that need hardware ask for hardware donations (say your old p3-500) and cluster them all together? That'd solve the redundancy problem as well as the money issue. Maybe it's just no worth it for some reason which i'm unaware.
Berto
Well now it's editor abuse, since every positive moderation the comment had "mysteriously" disappeared.
Almost every news article on that site is a joke anyway (don't get me wrong, I really like that site) and you can't possibly take everything on that site seriously.
it will be a shame in a climate of beggars if the genuine causes get lost in the noise
when that damn page always hangs when I go to it ?!? Hehehe...
From what I have read, adsense ads from google will be topic sensitive and bring in $100+ a day.
Maybe they need to look at that for a realistic long term solution.
Guys, they deserve it.
Wikipedia is one of the best resources out there. I did a school project on Stars and I found that Wikipedia simply blows other resources away. (I've never seen "Oh Boy, an F grade kills me" in any other encyclopedia).
Being a) a minor b) in australia c) without credit card unfortunately makes it hard for me to donate to them at the moment. I'll have to see what I can do (any Australians here willing to forward donations?)
Come on.. even a single buck can help anybody.
Wow, this comment went from +5 to -1 within about 20 seconds. It's good to know you're allowed to hold a dissenting viewpoint on slashdot and not get censored by the "editors" for it.
Way to go on posting a link on slashdot to a site that needs $20k so it will stop crashing on and off...I'm sure it really helps.
Don't worry, I'm sure they'll get bought out by MS/AOL/Yahoo! and become lame just like every other good thing on the internet.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Having edited a number of entries on Wikipedia myself, I have to say that this is a project worth saving. The sheer volume of information is remarkable, and often more useful than that in an encyclopedia. Moreover, the open nature of project leads, in my opinion, to more balanced articles. Article have to stand up to the scrutiny of thousands of different people, from many different countries around the world. All things considered, 20K isn't a whole hell of a lot to keep it going. I gave $10 myself, it would take just 2000 people doing so to get things back together. Hardly unreasonable...
No statement is true, not even this one.
how about i don't donate because i don't give a rat's ass about wikipedia? :D
thats my idea!
Don't complain to me, I paid my US$10.00. Unfortunately, my tax advisor tells me, regardless what I donate, the IRS still wants my soul on toast.
H0ek
Think you're smart? Prove you've got brains!
I for one think donating to a church so they can build another wing to the church is a complete waste of money. Makes the Mozilla => Amiga look like an inspired deal in comparison, but you do not find me bringing that up. ;-)
Help fight continental drift.
I can't agree enough with the poster above.
There is an enormous amount of negativity that I have seen thrtown around in this thread.
But to my mind, Wikipedia is one of the gemlike projects out there that has an enormous amount of unadulterated MERIT.
Many of the posts decrying the cry for funds fall into two camps:
1) What the hell, $20k for your website infrastructure? Plan better, you assholes!
or
2) Wikipedia is useless/not worth it.
Many of the posts SOUND like 1), but are driven by a strong desire to demonstrate 2) -- for instance, the large number of posts that are claiming that "Wikipedia has become too political".
I don't think that people realize what the real issue here is. The issue is nothing less than total freedom of information.
Articles on wiki are moderated by public opinion -- and while this has a moderate negative influence in HIGHLY CHARGED, HIGHLY CURRENT topics -- political ones, particularly -- the bottom line is that wikipedia provides an incredible way for the truth to be heard and recorded. Everyone can contribute to this record of defined "truth", and if a revelation is made, it can be judged on its merits by millions of people.
Essentially, in this age of enormous uncertainty, slanted polls, (corrupt?) (liberal? conservative?) "corporate media", in this age where the visible "barometers" of world opinion (polls/interviews/random tests/scientific research) -- the informational underpinnings of representative democracy! -- may be subject to large-scale manipulation, and freedom of information is being decided for years to come, Wikipedia provides, if not "absolute truth", a body of information that has been thoroughly bathed in the democratic process. It may not be as white and pure as if it were written by the existing information aristocracy/meritocracy, but it is most assuredly free to all, and as unbiased as that process can make it.
Support of Wikipedia is, in a sense, support of the principles of democracy/communism itself -- support of the idea that fairness is most reliably and safely accomplished by even "unqualified" consensus. It's everyone's information. This just makes the process transparent, and rips the lid off of "true" and "false", right and wrong, belief and disbelief, and transfers the power to the people.
Go Wikipedia! If there ever was a project with real, LONG-TERM value . . .
Forget the servers and the 20 grand.
Didn't you read the last Slashdot article on information overload? We need less wikis, not more wikis.
Wikipedia is gay like your mother.
...would tell a child that is asking for $20K he or she needs to get a job.
I think the "teach a man to fish" quote really applies here - Wikipedia needs to find a way to sustain itself. Ads, a premium subscription service or sponsors can go a long way.
Please, if you have money burning a hole in your pocket, donate it to the EFF to help fight for our rights that are being taken away. Let the people that run Wikipedia take a business 101 class and learn to pull their own weight.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
When such a public effort goes this big. Why not have it distributed.
Mirrors anyone?
Its write seldom read often. A good choice for mirroring. If no mirrors where found maybe a peer-to-peer solution?
Probably not peer to peer because of the latency. But antways.
They're a not for profit, charitable organization that provides a valuable resource to the internet community and they need funds to keep this resource available.
What do you mean by "they"? I've edited and contributed dozens of articles to Wikipedia, corrected countless typos, and introduced new information. "I", by virtue of donating my time and energy, am part of Wikipedia, but I won't see a dime of that $20,000, and I've never gotten so much as a "thank you" for my efforts. There are a lot of us in this position.
You know what: If they are asking for that kind of money (which I don't believe they are going to spend only for the purposes they claim), I am not going to contribute money, and I am no longer going to spend contributing to Wikipedia.
There aren't many sites with the scope, quality and credibility of Wikipedia. I gave CAD $10 and I'd give more if my credit card weren't crumbling under the weight of Christmas.
To me, this looks like rank incompetence, where they're begging for money after everything crashes and then they realize they need more hardware.
I'm sure this project has noble and honorable goals, but just because that is so doesn't mean it deserves anything.
The people who question this begging probably have real jobs, real bills, and understand the value of every dollar they make and spend.
The wiki philisophy needs some serious work if it couldn't figure out how to pay the bills than just passing the hat around. In the long term, that doesn't get very far.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
Why don't the Wikipedia people allow their site to be mirrored? A lot of people have some extra bandwidth and disk space to share. It could be hosted in multiple places similar to the way the Jargon File is distributed?
This would be a great problem for a wiki grid or something.
# awk '{print $1}' /usr/local/apache2/logs/pol_log |grep "28/Dec"|sort -r|uniq|wc -l
45105
Files served for the day 153764.... My bandwidth usage is scary. Man... just these two domains, would in theory, be enough for me to want a 20k machine too. Hell that doesn't include the spoofs I do like Scumgroup.com, Shafted.Us, and a crapload of other sites I have lurking around, AntiOffline.com, and I forget the others.
Traffic Rank for politrix.org: 703,455
Traffic Rank for clubxxxxxxxxx: 66,649
Traffic Rank for wikimedia.org: 692,781
So like I said... 20k is a lot of money for a personal machine. And MIND YOU I don't have any ads, sales, etc., on the site. I may put up tshirts, ONCE IN A BLUE ASS MOON, then take the revenue and send out those same assed t's to friends, or order some for myself.
Maybe he just needs better admins or something if his equipment keeps getting bonked out.
MoFscker
The content's under GNU FDL so they can't take that away from us. But Wikimedia should be more open about the costs involved.
Yes, we're about even in traffic with slashdot these days.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
anyone out there with a dollar burning a hole in their pocket. Let's face it, you really don't need that candybar anyway
That's not a candybar in my pocket.
... did /. become a forum for moral debates about charity vs. capitalism?
Whether you want to donate or not is your choice. Maybe you want to support open-source. Maybe you prefer that businesses sink or swim on their own. That's your deal. I just don't see why people feel the need to berate one another for their choices. If I want to donate, don't tell me I'm an idiot for throwing away money on a failed business model. If I don't, then don't tell me I'm betraying the ideals of open-source.
Either donate, or don't -- it's not your business what anyone else does.
"When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can't read." -- Hannibal Lecter
According to alexa wikipedia's traffic is around the same as Slashdot's. But traffic and connectivity is not a problem at all.
The problem is that wikipedia needs backup webservers (relatively cheap) and a backup db server (not cheap).
z.
You might consider Wikipedia's (meta) page titled Making fun of Britannica before holding it up too much as an absolutely authoritative reference.
Wikipedia is, according to alexa, within the top 1000 trafficked domains in the web.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
Yeah, they dont have pop-up ads, but what can they do? They can cut off the server whenever they feel like getting donation money, not when they really need it. Which is worse?
May I ask why asking some larger organization, a "foundation" is better than asking everyone any way you can? And, isn't /. a "foundation" if it wants to be? (Seems from this post that it does want to be). I kind of hate to say this, but if you don't like the story, don't read it.
/. readers that they shouldn't contribute personally and just wait for some "foundation" to take care of it.
No, Slashdot is not a foundation, and it is not remotely close to the best forum for regular panhandling. A "real" foundation can provide ongoing financial assistance rather than piecemeal handouts, and can certainly provide far greater $$$ than individuals. Sure, it takes some time and work to raise money, but if the folks behind wikipedia are serious about it, they'll do it. Asking users for funds isn't "wrong", it's just inefficient. Consider the Jerry Lewis Telethon, which regularly raises $50+ million for the Muscular Dystrophy Association; but the MDA takes in $160+ million a year from various sources; the huge effort of the Telethon doesn't even amount to 1/3 of the group's yearly revenue. That's an extreme example, but hopefully you get the idea.
Or at least STFU and stop trying to tell
I never said that. In fact I specifically said that I did contribute personally to help them get on their feet. But perhaps you could learn the difference between constructive criticism (my post) and flamebait (yours).
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
If I ask my Boss for 20 grand I better come up with a list of hardware and what everything does in order to justify that kind of money.
How is this flamebait? I support wikipedia, it's the people I'm arguing with who don't. I love information. I just don't like the emotional appeals that people make, saying "information [doesn't] want[s] to be free!". Information isn't a living thing. It doesn't want anything...
If I had the money, I would donate.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
There's been a few questions in the comments above. Here's a few points worth noting:
* Wikipedia won't be hurt by traffic from Slashdot traffic. It's only the database server that is down, not the web servers. Also, Wikipedia is one of the largest sites on the net today, so they have bandwidth enough.
* Wikipedia is not asking for money for more bandwidth now. They have enough.
* Wikipedia is not a regular web site. The database backend is fairly complicated, since they allow anyone to update any page, and store all revisions (and do various magical stuff with them). A big server is warranted.
* Wikipedia already has servers enough to cope with today's traffic as long as nothing fails. The $20k they're asking for is for hot spares. This means they already have $20k worth of hardware.
* Wikipedia needs money, not hardware. They need to be able to rely on one hardware vendor with service support, etc. Of course, if a company is willing to buy them some new high end stuff with service, it would probably be accepted.
* Wikipedia will not be closing down if they don't get $20k in donations. They will simply not be as reliable in the future as they could be with $20k worth of extra hardware.
Mod Parent UP!
Also donate:
http://www.wikimedia.org/letter.html
Support open source and free flow of information.
What happens when they outgrow their new setup? They are probably growing at a near-exponential rate, but since the owner wasn't so kind as to include any kind of information regarding server demands, we don't know. At that rate, they are sure to need another bail-out in a year or so. I have tried to use Wikipedia, but didn't find any value in any of its articles. Most of them were poorly copied from existing websites without crediting them and many of them were uninformed and horribly biased. The idea is a good one, but letting every single nut edit articles is not a good idea. I would donate if that was the whole story, but the fact that the owner chose not to even present the proposed items he wished to buy and upgrade, I feel there is a big loophole, thus, I will not be donating.
A blog like any other.
That's a rather nice ad hominem-- because I'm 16, I'm instantly not capable of writing an encyclopedia-type article?
You don't even know what I've contributed. For your information, I've added some information about some video games (just for the hell of it), information on James Randi and the JREF, and a few other topics regarding psychics and how they scam people (such as "hot" and "cold reading").
Oh, and how many encyclopedias include information on those subjects...?
You're an idiot.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
So do I. Where's my $20,000 ???
Hell, I would take 1/2 that...
"Complicated"
Uh huh, life's like this
Uh huh, uh huh, that's the way it is
Cause life's like this
Uh huh, uh huh that's the way it is
Chill out whatcha trolling' for?
Lay back with oxy sniff some more
And if you could only let it be
we sniff oxy
I like you only when you snort
let slashdotters support our junky sport
and you're sniffin with me one on one
but you've become
An Oxycrackwhore start sniffing some more
It's almost like crack and you can't relax
You're tryin' to be cool you're trying to drool out oxy!!!
Tell me
Why do you have to go and make things so complicated?
Just send me moolah
so I could start sniffing im-medi-ately
goddamnit for so long I've waited
Oxy's like this you - And you fall and you crawl and you break
and you take what you get and you turn it into oxycodone
and promise me I'm never gonna snort fake shit
no no no
Right. That's because experts are neither arrogant nor self-important, and they're always fully-educated and correct. Just like you.
There is a flaw in your reasoning in that due to the GPL and its 'wiki' nature, the website is just as much yours as anyone else's. I'm not saying you must donate or that you should choose to make it your website. Just that you have the opportunity to make it 'your' website, so 'it's not mine' is a weak reason to not donate.
Personally, I think asking for money is the wrong way to address the problem. The real problem isn't lack of money, it's lack or reliability. Instead of a temporary monetary bandaid, exploit the strength of the Internet and 'open source' to solve the problem. Migrate the wiki databases to a truly distributed system in which it is mirrored and updated around the world in real time. I'm not saying it will be easy. Just that it is a better long term solution than buying another server.
As much as I admire Wikipedia, I must say that on the whole I prefer Everything2. It allows for a personal edge that Wikipedia just doesn't have.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
So Wikipedia has three cheap servers and needs $20,000 to keep things going? I hope at least some of that is for conectivity. Unless they are thinking about buying hig-end servers, they can build quite a few nice ones for that 20k.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Now you may say what would this have to do with your post, much. For the typical user who's using DSL it may not be a problem, but on information based material, I would be skeptical to have a slew of file sharing going on due to authenticity issues. What if some retard decides to redo documents? What would be viable would be again, to check with some educational institute to see about using their resources, or starting writing to some of these foundations, e.g. Gates Foundation, to see if one of these ultra rich businessmen/women would be willing to donate to an extremely good cause.
MoFscker
a bunch of arrogant, half-educated, self-important g**ks blowing off on topics they hardly know.
So you have explained Slashdot, but what about Wikipedia?
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
It is not.
because I'm 16, I'm instantly not capable of writing an encyclopedia-type article?
Yes. Because encyclopedia articles, being primarily consumed by non-experts on the topic thereof, need to be credible. The consumers are not going to find a 16-year old, still in high school, a credible author.
And note that I've made no assumptions about whether the 16-year old is right or wrong. Which given the educational level and intellectual maturity of the typical 16-year old, is quite charitable.
Oh, and how many encyclopedias include information on those subjects...?
Have you considered the possibility that there's a good reason for not including them?
Are you adequate?
Maybe I'm just not "with it", but could someone explain what Wikipedia is, and why I should care that they need $20k? Such vital information seems to be strangely missing from the article.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Why do I get the feeling these guys just want something to play Doom 3?
just host their site on geocities like everybody else!
That's me.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
idiot
...send them a donation or don't send them a donation, but don't whine about it.
They're a great resource and I don't want to see them go.
Your mileage may vary.
Just my $0.02. (And, yes, my donation was more than $0.02).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This leaves us with brand name machines - and as we want to know where it has been, we'll buy it brand new.
Just to imagine how something of reasonable stability for the purpose might look, see this as an example.
Price ? $19499 and up...
Oh fuck you're stupid. Once I donate a buck or two it's no longer free. You stupid halfwit.
Well, my claim essentially would be that Wikipedia is to encyclopedias as /. is to meaningful discussion.
Are you adequate?
Do we really want to say that all sources are biased? What about the census?
More importantly, "everything is biased" just feels like an excuse. It's ok because everybody does it. With that formula, all media is about deception "the more a source claims to be 'balanced' the more likely it is biased." Nobody is trustworthy.
But even this is just the thin end of the wedge. If all media is biased, all facts reported are just matters of opinion. And everybody's opinion is equal. Creationists would love that viewpoint.
So, lets just call a duck a duck with respect to biased sources and not pretend that it is a law of physics that all media are inherently biased.
Dell 6300 server
Spec's: 2-4.5; 3-9.1 10,000 rpm; 3-18.2 7,200rpm; 620 ECC ram
Dual 500p3 512 cache
3 redundant power supplies
cd
floppy
3 3com nic cards
one-Adaptec 364 dell 64bit raid controller with 128 ram onboard
hot swappable drivers
Case looks very good
$900 + shipping
email me at wkm001@hotmail.com if he wants it or someone else.
Maybe instead of money, they need to move to a distributed and replicated system. It's easier for many institutions to donate bandwidth and server space by hosting something than by just giving cash. And it also reduces concerns that a single location may get too much control over the content (remember CDDB?).
Jeez, if you wanted to get a thank you note and money for proofing, then get a job as a proofreader. The rest of us are doing it because we want to. If you think they're doing such a poor job, then grab a copy of the wikipedia data and fork the project.
Nobody forced you to commit time to Wikipedia. Nobody's asking you to fork over money either.
I made the claim that people in high school are not qualified to write encyclopedia articles. How exactly is this a personal attack? It isn't even about *you* personally. If I'd said something like "LordK3nn3th is an Aspergers-riddled 16-year old slashdot poster, therefore what he claimed is wrong", then we'd have an ad-hominem. But we do not.
Rather, we have the ages-old trick of the fake ad hominem: "Look, he's attacking me personally! Therefore, he is WRONG! I WIN THE ARGUMENT!!! YIPPEEE!!!!!!!"
(I should mention that the irony of the "fake ad hominem" is that it is itself an ad hominem...)
Again, you have yet to comment on what I've written about.
I commented on what you wrote. Let me comment some more:
What exactly is supposed to be the argument here? You present these two ideas as a single sentence, implying there is a logical connection. Which of the following do you mean?- Wikipedia is a good resource, and because of that, you've contributed to it yourself.
- Wikipedia is a good resource, because you have contributed to it yourself.
If you mean the first one, then one's gotta ask you why do you think the fact that you've contributed to it is relevant to your claim. If you mean the second one, then the question becomes why do you think that the reason Wikipedia is good is because you contributed to it.In either case, you come out as somebody who's somewhat full of yourself.
And before you drag out your high school debate club list of fallacies, that was a conclusion, not a premise, and therefore, not part of a genuine ad hominem argument.
Are you adequate?
Truly priceless.
I've never used Wikipedia and until this article, I didn't really know exactly what it was. But I'll donate $10. What the hell. ($5 for me and $5 on behalf of that 16 year old that is getting ragged on in the other thread).
remember that when you return to the wikipedia collective. the pigs will have feasted, while you get nothing.
I forgot. The 1337 information source is anonymous, unaccountable g**ks on the net. Free information, dude. And bongs.
Are you adequate?
Mod that up for funny. :D
I personally get a kick out of 'experts' all the time... and as far as Wikipedia goes, you have the information *peer reviewed* by everyone who sees them...
Unlike most academic papers.
With a real encyclopedia, you get the name of the authors of any article, and their qualifications. Do you really want us to use the opinions of random people in the internet as authoritative reference on topics one doesn't know?
They only know whether the information he gave was useful or not.
They don't, because they have no way to check on his credentials. Sure, experts may theoretically fool article readers in a real encyclopedia, but (a) encyclopedia articles are subject to peer review by other experts, (b) article authors are not anonymous and may face consequences for pulling your leg.
So yes, if I'm reading up a reference article on a topic I don't know, I do want to know who wrote it, where he studied the topic, etc. That's the reasonable thing to do.
Are you adequate?
They could;
1. Sell advertisements.
2. Charge a nominal fee.
I am assuming one of the sites you are referring to would be the one you put at the end of your post? If thats the case you really need a reality check, you don't even come close to wikipedia or slashdot... Not to undermine the size of your site or anything, but you are not the big dog you think you are. You are comparing 2 3 digit ranked sites to 2 of your 6 digit ranked sites.
snowjournal.com vs wikipedia.org
skimaps.com vs wikipedia.org
Maybe this will put it a little more in perspective for you:
sun.com vs wikipedia.org
Excuse me, but peer review is a quintessential hallmark of academia.
Anyway, you should concentrate on what the word "peer" means. In an academic journal on, say, criminal sociology, where sociologists submit articles tom, "peer" means other sociologists. On a free "encyclopedia" where random bozos on the net submit articles, "peer" means random bozos on the net.
You need the right kind of peers to safeguard basic intellectual standards. Wikipedia doesn't provide them.
Are you adequate?
You're not the only one who votes with your dollars. And makers of real encyclopedias know that.
In any case, if you're that much interested on a single topic, you're better served by getting books entirely devoted to it, not an encyclopedia which happens to contain an article on it.
Are you adequate?
Is it safe? Do people here actually use it? I'd like to donate, but ISTR hearing about problems and scams with PayPal...?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
My second thought was that they could offer a subscription service. I'm sure thousands of people would pay $5 a month. Or they could charge by the page, ala Slashdot. If they want to maintain their non-profit status (which I believe they should), they could donate what they don't use to charity or something, but a small subscription fee would give them more than enough cash for hardware.
Plus, I agree with the above poster, the $20k seems a little high for operating expenses, unless they're figuring in future bandwidth costs, in which case they should say so.
In the meantime, I will gladly donate $50 or so. I think its one of the best resources on the web and it would be a shame to see it go. Good luck, Wikipedia!
I've never used Wikipedia - nor did I really know what it was until this article. I'll play around with it once the servers are more reliable. In the meantime, I donated $10. Five for myself and five for that 16 year old Wiki contributor taking a beating in the other thread.
:P
By the way, with all the server errors Slashdot is throwing this week, maybe they could use an injection of funds, too.
Given, I'm talking about a _small_ commercial service company, but $20K USD is not a huge amount of money for us to look at for hardware. Running big websites (and especially other app servers aswell) can require very high-quality hardware (read "expensive") and (potentially) licensing to do it reliably.
Seriously, these guys (I've never used the Wikipedia) could easily spend $20K on hardware and not have that great of a system...but they claim that it will fix their problems...if they provide a good FREE service (no-one seems to disagree with that,) then I trust their judgement. I think I'll go donate $10 just cause they're trying to do something good for the "Internet Community".
[BTW - I'm a partner in an Internet based business that actually makes a profit...$20K for hardware doesn't sound like much to ask. We've looked at single units - not complete systems mind you - that cost more than a quarter million USD.]
Kendell
I certainly encourage folks to donate, and I would myself if I had any cash at all. A small but eye-catching graphic and a properly maintained donation page would make a lot of difference. They'll probably get all the money they need for this crisis just from Slashdotters. (I mean $20K divided by 100K Slashdot readers, even allowing for a 90% apathy factor...) But I hope they'll put a stronger fundraising strategy in place for the long term.
$20,000 for hardware is insane. Especially considering they waited for it to break before figuring out how they were going to pay for it.
It might be a good idea to consider figuring out what's broke and just fixing that. If it's just the memory that flaked out, buy new memory. If it's the MB, buy a new MB.
It's quite apparent you don't have the business plan or the funds to warrent $20,000 in new hardware.
It's just another case of "you owe us." "We don't need to plan ahead because if we need anything, the community owes us."
There's exactly zero reason to drop the whole project just because they can't afford the latest and greatest.
Put it on lesser hardware and a lesser connection if they have to, until they can rebuild on something a little better.
My server is surviving just fine with standard consumer level parts except for the 1U case which isn't something consumers tend to buy. I won't be buying 20,000 worth of server equipment until the site earns it.
They don't even sell advertising for crying out loud. Allowing people to view for free but charge them a small monthly amount to submit information is an option. Selling the encyclopedia on DVD is another option. Or charging a small yearly fee to view is an option. Heck, you could even sell budget copies of Linux distroes. Get Linux and Support Wikipedia.
Apparently the new fairy in town is the Slashdot Fairy where you cry your woes and it gives you gobs of free money to make your problems go away.
No thanks. You at need to learn how to help yourself first. Even beggers play a tune. And no I don't use Wikipedia so don't reply claiming I somehow owe them something.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Ok, I've never used wikipedia myself, it's a shame it's down right now because I wanted to give it a try.
I have seen other wiki sites and noticed that ANYONE could come in and make changes to existing articles.
How does wikipedia protect the integrity of GOOD articles? What's to stop some bozo from going in and wrecking a 10 page biography of an important historical figure with goatse links or other nonsense?
I said no such thing. I'll make up for your lack of ethics, and quote myself:
That's not a statement, that's a yes/no question. And before you say that there's an implied statement in that question, let me point out that in no point I said or questioned whether you are qualified to write Wikipedia articles-- I questioned whether you are qualified to write encyclopedia articles. By equating these two claims, you are sneakily trying to assume a point that's at stake-- that Wikipedia is not a genuine encyclopedia, and that it's dishonest to claim otherwise.Since you seem to be fond of listing fallacies such as "ad hominem", I'll pull out the high school debate club manual and give this one a name: Assuming the Conclusion.
Why, exactly, are you attacking -me-, and not whether what I write is correct or not?
I've not attacked you. I suggested you're not qualified to write encyclopedia articles. And you keep on confirming it in deeds.
It's not the fact that you are attacking me, it's the fact that you are saying I am not intellectually capable of writing a decent article (or even a correction!) for wikipedia, simply because of my age.
First of all, you're assuming the conclusion again by sneaking in "wikipedia". I'll mentally substitute "an encyclopedia" in there, in order to treat my claims fairly where you have failed to do so.
With that proviso, how is that an attack? You assume that it somehow diminishes you that you're not qualified to write an encyclopedia article. This assumption tells a lot about you, but I'll let that pass.
Let's put it this way, if it makes it less of a blow for you. You're not qualified to write an encyclopedia article-- and neither am I. Now, if we assume that I'm not attacking myself by saying that (i.e. we rule out "self ad hominem"), since I'm saying the same thing about myself, then it follows that I can't be attacking you.
Also, you keep on talking about how I'm not an "expert". Are you saying that "experts" are never wrong?
Experts are wrong all the time. Science is, after all a progression of mistakes. An encyclopedia article is not primarily intended to be "right"-- it is intended to provide a fair, balanced, authoritative survey of expert opinion on a topic, for a non-expert audience.
Your failure to understand the task, as demonstrated by what you say, disqualifies you from writing encyclopedia articles.
Are you adequate?
Also, you may have heard that there are such things as libraries. Where you can actually check out a book without buying it-- and even photocopy an encyclopedia article (or even several ones). Go figure.
Are you adequate?
$20,000 is a nice, round number to set for a fundraising target, not an itemized total. We got /.ed a little early and the shopping list isn't complete, I'm afraid, and I can't just make something up for you.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
Oh yes. I'm sure the SlashDot effect will help them out :)
No encryption can withstand the power of the Lucky Guess.
because anyone (even you) can make changes to the encyclopedia and write new articles. Thus there has to exist ONE SINGLE DATABASE where this changes are collected. That is exactly what they need money for.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
But on a more serious note, like many community based Internet projects, Wikipedia will succeed if they fill a needed void with many people, which I do not believe they do. The user interface sucks to high heaven, the information is difficult to access, and questionable when you finally do get something. I'm just not sure what Wikipedia is for.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I don't. That's the point, isn't it? Whereas for a real encyclopedia, I do.
It's a matter of trust, not of accuracy. Suppose there's some topic where I know absolutely nothing. What should I prefer: (a) an article by somebody who I can verify to be an expert, and has in turn been reviewed by experts, or (b) one by a random collection of anonymous persons on the net?
Of course, from my uninformed perspective, (a) is the correct choice. It could even be the case that the (b) was a factually more accurate article, and still (a) would be the best choice, because I have no way of establishing trust for the second one.
Of course, in real life, the real encyclopedias have better articles than Wikipedia as a general rule anyway.
Are you adequate?
For details of what we are purchasing, or if you have expertise and would like to help guide us, join the wikitech-l mailing list. [Note that when Wikipedia is down, the mailing list subscription is affected, too.]
I would like to donate, but I do not donate to causes that try to hide what they will do with the money. And it looks like that is what is being done here.
Tell that the Red Cross.
Dude, if you want to discuss the very real problems with peer review in academia, I bet we'll find lots to agree on. But my claim is that peer review in academia establishes far more trust in its products than the supposed counterpart in Wikipedia.
Are you adequate?
I know this hurts, but the reason is... Wikipedia is not that useful to that many people. This is not flamebait or a troll, it's a fact. The fact that it is not that meaningful to many people does not mean it's not an honorable project, just that it is mostly a niche project. That's why it's going to be hard for them to scare up 20 grand. Perhaps they should set their sights just a tad lower, money-wise, I mean there are HUGE "open source" projects out there that have MUCH wider use that can't scare up a lousy 20 g's.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
is my breakfast-lunch-and-dinner....for a week or so. And that's my holiday feast.
One of the disadvantages of a career student in the Silicon Valley.
Now, please, compare it to Wikipedia's "peer review" process. Thanks.
Are you adequate?
I got an Ipod buyaaa, umbop. I also like food especially hotdogs. Yummmmmy
Sure.
Most peer reviewed articles have only between 3-7 reviewers, those reviewers are often not paid for their efforts and the effort they make is highly variable.
With Wikipedia, the number of peer reviewers is unlimited. In specialist or highly technical fields, the number of participants is still limited, so peer review cannot compete with specialist journals in the academic world. On the other hand, most encyclopedias don't really contain such specialist information in the first place.
The efforts individual contributors make to Wikipedia is, of course, also highly variable as in the case of peer-reviewed journal papers. Unlike peer-reviewed journals, however, there is no deadline for the final manuscript after which no error can corrected.
Finally, whereas many journals will have a two-stage review process (a preliminary review, notice of acceptance/rejection, subsequent requests for elaboration/changes) over a matter of a few months -- limiting the interaction between the peers to a few discrete instances -- peer review on Wikipedia allows constant revision of the article and, using the talk pages, unlimited discussion as well.
To be honest, I have no fondness for a lot of Wikipedia articles. I think anime is ridiculously overweighted in the 'Japanese culture' articlese and it depresses me to think of the amount of time spent on articles such as the homestar runner article... but those articles only represent a part of Wikipedia and I hope that they also provide a point of entry/training ground for contributors who will continue to participate as they finish their high school/undergraduate/graduate programs (/get real world experience) and have something a little bit more valuable to offer.
Could the point be you can't just sling mud in the form of a question and then say "well that was only a question" as if that made it non-offensive?
I disagree with your 'irrelevancy'. You picked the wrong topic when you decided to tear into the concept of 'peer review' earlier in the thread. I also don't think we'll agree on much in the way of peer review in traditional academia, but that's an unsubstantiated opinion based on the heuristic data you have provided within the last hour.
Frankly, I think my comments defending the points made on peer review are much more relevant than criticizing a 16 year old about trying to share what he knows, and learn from the experience. More power to him.
Back on topic: It's real simple. Donate, or don't.
and Wikipedia for the most part has the most updated info available. Lots of places are outdated, dead, et cetera.
Yea, what do they think they're a fucking public library or something? Commies...
Honestly, who in America in their right capitalist mind would donate money to keep a public service in operation? Stalin at his best, damn lefty-bleeding-heart-liberal-communist-hippies. Get a job.
So now, instead of assuming the conclusion, you've progressed to bald assertion. Cool. Maybe next you'll even argue for the point.
You seem to think that encyclopedias need some sort of certification. That's bullshit.
It is not. It is the natural consequence of what an encyclopedia is supposed to do: provide authoritative information on a variety of topics for a non-expert audience. Wikipedia does not meet the criterion of authoritativeness. It is an encyclopedia "wannabe".
You focus more on the person than the accuracy of what is said.
I focus on the authoritativeness of the information as ascertained by the credentials of the person providing it. The target audience of an encyclopedia article has no other choice, because it's precisely his inabilty to know the accuracy of the article that make them into the target audience.
I think I am qualified to write any article on things I am knowledgeable about.
Not in any venue. Quite simply, the requirements of an encyclopedia article are such that merely incidental knowledge of the topic, however accurate, isn't enough; it's authoritativeness that counts.
Are you adequate?
With Wikipedia, the number of peer reviewers is unlimited. In specialist or highly technical fields, the number of participants is still limited, so peer review cannot compete with specialist journals in the academic world. On the other hand, most encyclopedias don't really contain such specialist information in the first place.
Should have added that as wikipedia continues to expand, more experts will be participating in niche fields, and so the knowledgebase will expand.
Always, always, always run some kind of burn-in suite on new hardware before putting it into production. Even if your manufacturer does stress testing, your server was likely handed over to a shipping company that mistreated it (guaranteed). (VA-)CTCS is a good burn-in suite. If a machine survives one week of CTCS, in our environment it means that it will be worry free for at least 18 months (so far)--not counting inevitabilities like a hard disk mechanical failures (sigh).
We installed seven new servers at a colo in order to migrate a growing web site off of a shared server. CTCS discovered bad RAM in what was to be our database server, a faulty storage controller(!) in our file server, and a bad disk in one of the web servers.
None of these issues were apparant from the get-go. Most of the servers revealed problems within the first 36 hours of CTCS burn-in, with one holding out for 47 hours. If we hadn't run CTCS these issues would no doubt be hounding us for months.
So, two rules of thumb:
If possible, have your server built by a local vendor. The ability to walk into an office and scream at someone is a powerful resource, and you can completely bypass abrasive shipping companies by delivering the server to a colo yourself.
In any event, get your vendor to run CTCS before shipping and run CTCS again once it's on the rack. 72 hours minimum on both ends.
Don't learn these lessons the hard way. The extra time you spend up front can literally save you months of headaches in late night colo phone calls and other consequences of unplanned downtime.
No. There can be many databases. They just have to replicate their commits. Wikipedia even has a short (fairly uninformative) article about distributed databases. Distributed databases have only been around for 40+ years so I can see why you've not heard of them.
I know, I know. Smoke a lot of dope, the brain cells go... The web address YOU, sir, are looking for is FuckedComany.com. I know this board looks a lot like it, so I understand your confusion.
90% is either not accurate or pure propaganda
They'll raise that money by donations, and the next time(s) too.
You know why? Because people like to encourage good ideas and small donations are the way of the future. If some bloggers can make a good living off their thing, I don't see why such an awesome project like WikiPedia couldn't afford new servers once in a while.
Screw the mass-marketing of everything. Screw throwing away cool ideas just because you can't come up with a way to sell them out (a.k.a. The Holy Business Model).
Agreed. Though now I see that there's a complication sneaking in: we're in risk of mixing up peer review of journal and encyclopedia articles. But let's go on.
With Wikipedia, the number of peer reviewers is unlimited.
In principle, yes. In practice? And how exactly does it follow that a large number of reviewers makes for better articles?
In specialist or highly technical fields, the number of participants is still limited, so peer review cannot compete with specialist journals in the academic world. On the other hand, most encyclopedias don't really contain such specialist information in the first place.
Yes. Journals aren't really all that good a comparison. I propose we consider the peer review process that would apply to encyclopedia articles: the editor sends off articles for comments to experts in the topics in question, making it clear that this article is intended for a general audience, and they should judge it accordingly.
The efforts individual contributors make to Wikipedia is, of course, also highly variable as in the case of peer-reviewed journal papers.
Yes. But you leave out the facts that (a) pretty much everybody in the process is anonymous (yes, journals use anonymous reviewers, but there's an editor who isn't anonymous), (b) a contributor could be anybody. I.e. you have no information on the reviewers/contributors. To put it in terms of security, there's a trust issue. Also, there are issues having to do with the fact that the persons who contribute to Wikipedia articles are a very self-selected group.
Unlike peer-reviewed journals, however, there is no deadline for the final manuscript after which no error can corrected.
This is not strictly true. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy doesn't have such deadlines. You're confusing review by competent experts with electronic publishing.
Hell, I remember when I was a child, we had the World Book encyclopedia, which was edited on a yearly basis. They also put out Yearbooks where they included the updated articles from that year's edition-- they came with stickers for you to put on the start of the old article, saying that you had a newer version. Even in the world of paper, your argument doesn't follow.
Finally, whereas many journals will have a two-stage review process (a preliminary review, notice of acceptance/rejection, subsequent requests for elaboration/changes) over a matter of a few months -- limiting the interaction between the peers to a few discrete instances -- peer review on Wikipedia allows constant revision of the article and, using the talk pages, unlimited discussion as well.
I don't see how this improves the quality of the content, and I certainly don't think it addresses the trust issue.
Sure, there also are trust issues involved with journals and traditional encyclopedias. And abuses, even. But they're not as extensive as with Wikipedia.
To be honest, I have no fondness for a lot of Wikipedia articles. I think anime is ridiculously overweighted in the 'Japanese culture' articlese and it depresses me to think of the amount of time spent on articles such as the homestar runner article...
A function of self-selection in the editorial process.
Are you adequate?
I can price a compaq g3 dual proc 2.8 xeon's with 2 gig of ram, 3 - 36 gig scsi 10k, 5300 scsi controller, redundant power supply for around $8,000. with proper bandwidth this one server could easily handle the traffic this website generates.
Second that. Tell Amnesty International, the Salvation Army, Doctors without borders, etc. to get a good business model, as donations are not good enough.
I do however realise that it's a free ressource and all, but nonetheless, there are other ways to sustain a site, other then asking for donations
If the product is viable, they can offer consulting for commercial installation, or they could offer a "premium" service where subscriber get access to a dedicated server, while the unwashed get to share whatever's left of the ressource,
At least in this case:
1. It's not a product, not in the way you're talking about it anyways, so I don't think providing installation services is going to be very helpful.
2. I think the idea of offering a dedicated server to subscribers and the table scraps for the unwashed is antithetical to the whole idea of the Wikipedia project. The way I see it, it's akin to the public school system (although given the quality of public schools in the U.S., I hate making this analogy as I think the Wikipedia is quite good). We all pay taxes, into the system, some more and some less according to their ability to do so, and in exchange we get a public school system that is there to serve everybody's children. And for all you anti-government tax haters, it's even better because you're not FORCED to pay into the system. It's your CHOICE whether or not to, but as long as enough people do, the system is there to serve everybody.
But if you're going to come after me for my hard earned money, you better have something to give in exchange for it.
They are. They're giving you the Wikipedia. Or is it that you're asking for something extra that nobody else (or at least those who do not donate) gets? Doesn't that go against the whole spirit of sharing and giving back to the greater community?
It's a cold way to look at it, but in this economic context, I'd rather spend on something other then someone else's website
Then go for it. Give to Habitat for Humanity or the Salvation Army or the LCV or the ACLU or the Boys and Girls Club or whatever. Or don't give any money to anybody at all. If what they are doing doesn't benefit you or your family or society in some way that you approve of, then feel free not to give them any money; there's lots of people/organizations who ask me for money that I don't contribute to for these very reasons, and you're free to do the same. But if you do use it and you do like it and you are able to contribute something but choose not to, then don't come bitching to me or anybody else when it's gone for lack of financial support. That being said, I like what they are doing and therefore my check's in the mail (f**k PayPal).
fuck you.
But dammit, this guy has it all in this sentence:
But to my mind, Wikipedia is one of the gemlike projects out there that has an enormous amount of unadulterated MERIT.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
It's not a lot of money, about what you'll pay walking in to Starbucks for a coffee and an overpriced pastry.
The idea of putting high quality detailed information about everything up for free and open to contributions is a wonderful gift to humanity.
My opinion of Slashdot's user community, on the other hand, has gone down considerably after reading the sour bitch-fest that some people have been posting.
The world moves forward when bold and inspired and tenacious people sit down and create something new. We should be applauding and supporting them. If you have nothing useful to contribute to your fellow human beings, you can at least shut up while other people get on with it.
Of Progres...
The definition of Encyclopaedia does not include 'credentialed information'. Your argument is based on the fact that you have been taught to trust credentials. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does eliminate a lot of information that could be useful for others.
Authoritative information does not necessarily have to come from someone with credentials. A Mechanical Engineer with a PhD may be able to explain the concepts of the Wankle Rotary engine, but it takes a *Mechanic* to tell you how to maintain it. And it takes a driver to tell you how to drive a car with a Wankle.
You do not focus on the person, I agree. You focus on trails of letters; you focus on the alphabet soup, and that's worrisome. If credentials stood for everything authoritative, medical doctors wouldn't be paying malpractice insurance.
What's more, with the technology of the Wiki, the kid can write what he knows, and others can build it into something more representative over time. And from what I've read of, he's writing about how people get ripped off by Psychics. Could you tell me what sort of qualification he should have for that? Psychic Police Academy?
You're spending a lot of time trying to prove something, but your conclusion escapes you - like all the threads that you've stopped responding on.
Quit picking on a young mind that is trying to do something to improve the world, and perhaps take the time to improve the world yourself.
Sure it is: it's still a free resource to those who are unable to contribute money. Sure, it's also free to the freeloaders who could contribute but won't, and if you want to you can be one of them, so long as your conscience doesn't bother you.
fuck you.
Compare this with
To my mind requiring $10 from a small fraction of users is more sustainable (long term) than requiring $599 from all users. In general I don't think asking for donations is a 'stopgap' measure.(Mind you, in this case I think distributing the database is a better solution than throwing money at it.)
Wikipedia is an interesting experiment, perhaps worthy of financial support, but it's by no means clear that the technology-supported-consensus-opinion facilitated by the wiki will yield information that is consistently unbiased fair and true. You describe this process as "democratic", which perhaps it is to some degree, but only those with access to the internet get to "vote". Since we know that participation in the internet remains skewed with respect to economic class, race, education level, and gender, some degree of bias and elitism is inherent in the wiki process -- at least until such time as internet access is truly universal.
So, "unbiased" seems at risk from the outset. It's not clear how to evaluate "fair" as applies to the non-editorial presentation of unbiased information. When it comes to information about history or current events, substantiated facts might be generally preferred over "fairness". Perhaps most history and other information would be perceived as unfair by someone, regardless of whether a majority voted it to be unbiased and factually true. Minority oppression is one of the greatest risks of a democratic process.
With respect to the ability of a democratic process to determine truth, consider the now classic case study of Al Gore's alleged claim to have invented the internet. Widely accepted and unquestioned by most people as a fact, Mr. Gore in truth made no such claim, even though variously measured majorities would almost certainly claim it to be true. Also consider that pollsters periodically test people's basic and strictly objective knowledge on some subject or another and find it sadly wanting.
The democratic process as a model for truth building seems a foundation of sand, at least so long as ignorance remains rampant.
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. -- Albert Einstein
So let me get this straight...of all the people who read /., and of all the people who *commented* on the article...
Goal: $20,000.00
Money raised: $4,212.96
Remaining: $15,787.04
So out of all the people bitching about it...we've raised 12.96?!...
What do you mean by "they"? I've edited and contributed dozens of articles to Wikipedia, corrected countless typos, and introduced new information. "I", by virtue of donating my time and energy, am part of Wikipedia, but I won't see a dime of that $20,000, and I've never gotten so much as a "thank you" for my efforts. There are a lot of us in this position.
"They" most likely refers to the Wikimedia Foundation, the official organization that pays the bills to keep the lights on so that you can volunteer your time and effort to contribute to the project. That's right, you are (or were from the sounds of it) a VOLUNTEER, and except as used in the context of the military, that usually means you don't get paid. It works the same in the online world as it does IRL. When I volunteer to pick up litter or plant trees or whatever, I don't do it expecting money. I'm sure that if they were going to pay everybody who contributed to the Wikipedia, they would have to ask for a hell of a lot more than $20,000.
As far as not getting a "thank you", on the one hand that's not a totally unreasonable gripe. Having spent a lot of time organizing work projects of various sorts for non-profits, I know that failure to praise and when possible recognize and reward those who contribute is a good way to squander morale and lose your volunteers. However, the fact that you expect it as if you have some sort of inalienable right to it is pretty fucking petty. I suggest you reassess why you would contribute time/money to a project in the first place, stop acting like a spoiled brat, and grow up.
You know what: If they are asking for that kind of money (which I don't believe they are going to spend only for the purposes they claim), I am not going to contribute money, and I am no longer going to spend contributing to Wikipedia.
I can't speak for everybody, but I wouldn't have an issue if they spent some of the money on other purposes, so long as they account for it and it is related to the project. I'm sure equipment isn't the only expense they have. In fact, I would suggest they set aside some money to work with a grant writer so that they can apply for foundation money that could better support the ongoing needs of the project.
fuck you.
In principle, yes. In practice? And how exactly does it follow that a large number of reviewers makes for better articles? Fair enough. How doesn't it? If an encyclopaedia is supposed to represent knowledge of mankind, shouldn't as much of mankind contribute and peer review as possible? In turn you may argue that such democratic attributes can work against the Wikipedia, but I'll toss back at you that people who don't like bubblegum don't chew bubblegum - people who aren't interested in a topic won't contribute or even peer review it. But people who are will. And people who are *interested* are usually better than 9-5 folks who got their diplomas so that they would never be at a loss for toilet paper. Not all credentialed people are like this, but guess what? The ones interested would... contribute. :o
Yes. Journals aren't really all that good a comparison. I propose we consider the peer review process that would apply to encyclopedia articles: the editor sends off articles for comments to experts in the topics in question, making it clear that this article is intended for a general audience, and they should judge it accordingly.
Actually, journals are a good comparison. Traditional print media has *less time* to peer review because of the physical process.
Yes. But you leave out the facts that (a) pretty much everybody in the process is anonymous (yes, journals use anonymous reviewers, but there's an editor who isn't anonymous), (b) a contributor could be anybody. I.e. you have no information on the reviewers/contributors. To put it in terms of security, there's a trust issue. Also, there are issues having to do with the fact that the persons who contribute to Wikipedia articles are a very self-selected group
Anonymity scares some - perhaps yourself - but if the information is subject to the people interested, the content is more important than who said what, who wrote what, and who did what. By your same logic, you shouldn't use a computer unless you know the credentials of everyone who designed and built it - from the microprocessor to the keyboard. If that is what you wish, then so be it. That's why DoD contractors cost the government so much, and still turn out products that fail because they give the government EXACTLY what they asked for instead of what they needed.
This is not strictly true. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy doesn't have such deadlines. You're confusing review by competent experts with electronic publishing.
Hell, I remember when I was a child, we had the World Book encyclopedia, which was edited on a yearly basis. They also put out Yearbooks where they included the updated articles from that year's edition-- they came with stickers for you to put on the start of the old article, saying that you had a newer version. Even in the world of paper, your argument doesn't follow.
Well... Philosophy certainly doesn't change very fast.
And as far as the stickers - you fail to realize that the process itself of preparing the new stickers - from writing to editing, from editing to print, from print to getting it to your doorstep - took about... oh... a year. Really. But back then, things happened slower because computers were less used. Times have changed, the world has changed... everything is happening faster... and so the representation of the data must be faster. Enter Wikipedia.
I don't see how this improves the quality of the content, and I certainly don't think it addresses the trust issue. Sure, there also are trust issues involved with journals and traditional encyclopedias. And abuses, even. But they're not as extensive as with Wikipedia.
I think we've established that your opinion on this is conjecture, and perhaps dated. You don't have to like it, you don't have to contribute, and you don't have to use it...
But your kids might.
I have asked one of the workers/devs that has posted in this discussion.
/.ed a little early and the shopping list isn't complete, I'm afraid, and I can't just make something up for you"
8 25 449
The answer was, and I quote, " $20,000 is a nice, round number to set for a fundraising target, not an itemized total. We got
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=90780&cid=7
Dictionary entries are not arguments. If dictionary entries tried to tell everything about the term they try to define, they'd be even longer than encyclopedia articles.
You're just pulling shit out of your ass.
Nope. I've observed how real encyclopedias are made (a group of editors asks a set of experts to write draft articles, give the drafts to other experts for review and comments, then pass the comments back to the authors), and I've carefully considered what the use of an encyclopedia is from the perspective of a reader who doesn't know *anything* about the topic. If an encyclopedia weren't authoritative, why should its target audience trust it?
You, on the other hand, have done nothing but:
- falsely claim that I've attacked you personally;
- state my claims incorrectly so as to support your fake ad hominem;
- assume the conclusions I'm questioning, and/or baldly assert them;
- presented nothing better as an argument than a dictionary definition, and one that does not contradict my claim;
- failed to address my substantive points about how, given the target audience, authority is more important than accuracy to an encyclopedia.
Give it up.Are you adequate?
But if you're going to come after me for my hard earned money, you better have something to give in exchange for it.
You're a real gem of a human being, aren't you? It's really depressing to know that organizations fighting AIDS, river blindness, malnutrition, famine, pollution, and illiteracy in third world countries have to deal with self-centered assholes like you when they call for donations.
If the product is viable, they can offer consulting for commercial installation, or they could offer a "premium" service where subscriber get access to a dedicated server, while the unwashed get to share whatever's left of the ressource.
Yeah, fuck the poor kids in inner cities and developing nations who rely on resources like Wikipedia. If they can't pony up with a Visa Platinum card like you, then they can just suck wind.
You talk about your "hard earned money." Just how hard was it? Do you work as hard for a dollar as some guy below the poverty line who picks strawberries in the hot sun? Do you work as hard for each dollar as a guy who sews shoes for Nike in a third world country? Just how hard is it for you to earn a few bucks to send to a valuable educational resource like Wikipedia?
We finally ended up with a medium priced Britannica set - including the index on CD and the Britannica Junior. Note that at the time I was working in the budding Internet at the time - gopher and WAIS being just getting going and the Web only just starting to find its way out of Cern.
The books ended up in a separate room in our new house that we lovingly called the Library - and I actually got our two boys to use them once in a while for the first couple of years.
Of course we had full time connection to the budding 'Net during this time and I also helped them learn about it too.
We ended up donating the books to the High School - no tax write-off or anything - and giving the Juniors to my brother/sister-in-law for their younger kids to try. Our boys have found anything they've needed in the intervening years on the 'Net - but have had to have help to colate and interpret it. Nothing like what is in this project.
I wish I had the money now to give to Wikipedia. I've given some, and will try to give more in the not too distant future - and will continue to add articles as I see a need (and can fulfill it).
Even now that the major encylopedias are available via subscription on the 'Net, they lack the depth and immediacy that I've seen in WikiPedia. In some areas they are still ahead - but I expect that to change in day or weeks, certainly within months.
In the mean time - this is one of the best projects I've seen in my 15+ years connected with the 'Net - give if you can, please!
Keep up the great work - all of us/you :)
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
Or perhaps Wikipedia is a bunch of people contributing information about topics that they're experts in, rather than a bunch of general researchers who simply compile information without the critical eye of expertise. I contributed to a few sections on aerodynamics, which I guarantee I can tell you more about than any lay researcher.
irb(main):001:0>
So, according to you, from a purely economic standpoint (as always), public libraries should be offering "premium" services to those who can pay for information and normal users should be constantly spammed?
I've received great enjoyment from just browsing the Wikipedia articles. I've never just "donated" to a website before (though I've bought paid services at a couple, for example LiveJournal), but Wikipedia is an excellent project, and I felt it deserved a couple bucks. I'm poor as shit at the moment, so I couldn't spare much, but, as the submission says, I don't really need that candy bar. :)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Donations are always a stopgap measure and aren't a substitute for a real company model -- be that business or otherwise. If advertising or merchandising is out (for ethical or whatever reasons), then they should be turning to foundations that can help with non-profit fundraising"
Having written grants and dealt with foundations, I can tell you that it's a lot harder to break into then you would think. While there is a lot of money to be given out, most foundations already have a list of organizations that they give to regularly and which comprise the bulk of their donations, and getting onto that list is not a short-term project. It can take years of building relationships, showing results, and other assorted ass-kissing. One of the things that foundations are going to look at before they're willing to give is what other sources of you have, so asking for donations from the general public is not a bad way to go, short and long term.
All that being said, I don't think you're point is without merit. What Wikimedia really needs to do is come up with a long-term financial plan instead of this piece-meal crap, hire a grant writer and start going after foundation money. But that's not going to negate the need to raise money from other sources, and it's not going to help them immediately.
fuck you.
people in high school are not qualified to write encyclopedia articles.
You seem to have missed this point: Wikipedia works because not everyone knows everything about everything. The initial source of the information is irrelevant; if any given piece of information is incorrect or misleading, it WILL be corrected.
Bottom line: Go read wikipedia. If you find something you can correct, improve, or expand upon, do so. If you can't, you obviously don't know enough to bitch about it. But chances are someone else does.
L
Can someone please hit a switch and hit unlock the half-size baseball bats for us?
Using read-only mirrors, even just as front ends that passed users through to the real database to do updates, would probably solve all the realistic scaling issues too. Or they could partition their database onto separate systems by subject, since I don't imagine their are any real data interdependencies between subjects in a Wiki system.
give a man a fish,
he eats for a day,
teach a man to fish,
and he eats for a lifetime.
If their website needs 20 grand to survive then perhaps it should be allowed to fail? Obviously it's not paying for itself, and if the owner is unwilling to put up his own money and unwilling to make money through ads, registrations, etc then what happens when you need *another* 20 grand? Another
I'm not ashamed to say I think this is utter crap and I certainly hope this site crashes and burns.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Yes. Why do you ask?
Presumably because you think you've caught me in a contradiction. But you haven't.
Are you adequate?
and raise you one... I donated too.
C'mon ya geeks... everyone knows and has probably read Wikipedia; stick a crowbar in your wallet and cough up a few bucks. Yes, I know it's the holidays and everyone's tapped out, but really... who doesn't have a paypal account with a couple of extra bucks sitting in it? (if you're genuinely broke, relax... I'm not talking to you)
I see people in my medical practice all the time who tell me how they can't afford their antibiotics (even the cheap generic) or other medicine, yet they smoke two packs a day, have a cell phone AND pager, and manage to find beer-drinking money every week. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it often comes down to priorities.
If you've got the cash, why not part with a few bones? I'm sure Wiki would appreciate it if the community would ante up.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I gave $20. Go there and give them some money. Wikipedia is by far the interesting site on the web for me. When I get in it's hard to get out. No nonsense, no political agenda (except perhaps in articles on Microsoft and Bill Gates), thoroughly crosslinked. I spend hours reading it, very educational. For example, look at their article on F-word. Where else can you find something this comprehensive?
Here's the list archive. Signup probably won't work right now since the main mail server is on one of the machines that's down, but you can send mail to the list (wikitech-l at wikipedia.org) and it'll go through the backup MX just fine.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
No, that makes you a fucking moron. :-)
Since I've narrowly applied this criterion to encyclopedia articles, I declare this point irrelevant to our discussion.
(Yes, I'm em, and I've hit the 25 post/day limit because two people downrated me above. The all-seeing slashcode orthodoxy-enforcement apparatus has declared me to be TEH TROLL. *sigh*)
Have you considered the possibility that, having a name like Estanislao, you might be better suited to hitting on fat white women and driving round in your Chevy?
Now, was that a question or a personal attack?
Thanks for the pointer to VA-CTCS, we'll check it out.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
"Estanislao Martinez" is an old, well known troll account. Which should be obvious from the fact that the URL in his posts is Adequacy, the infamous troll site (at which he was an editor).
Sir, if I had mod points right now, you would get them. *That* information clinched my donation. More and more, I find when I'm searching that I seem to be running across rather well-written Wikipedia articles that give me all the information I need.
Mods -- thanks in advance for your assistance.
Pleas for money by an open source project are usually an indication that there is something pretty fundamentally wrong with the project. Open source projects should generally not require monetary donations, they should live on donations of time, bandwidth, and hosting.
In this case, asking for money suggests that the project isn't well architected. A different architecture would allow the content to be hosted and edited on many sites. Then people could donate bandwidth and hosting instead of money.
The term "collective" refers specifically to a communist form of work by a group under government guidance. You can't have collectives in the US because there is no government to organize them.
What you are referring to would be more like a "cooperative" in the US--a business enterprise operated and managed by its own customers. Some farming communities used to have for shopping, lending, etc. Cooperatives are a traditional American institution and, unlike collectives, they are independent of government.
But that is entirely unnecessary. The problem with the Wikipedia plea is not that they are asking for donations--donations have always been and will always be an essential part of open source software--it's that they are asking for donations of money. Donations of money are difficult to make and inefficient. Open source software is software that is developed by donations in kind: donations of development time and expertise, bandwidth, and hosting.
Your use of the term "collective" is an apparently deliberate attempt to link open source with communism; I find that reprehensible and intellectually dishonest of you.
I don't have up-to-the-minute numbers, but several hours ago it was up about $2000 from the initial figure.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
Now stop biting.
anyone care to explain what wikipedia is?
I know it's not perfect, but there was no Creative Commons when Wikipedia was started, and it's not clear what would have been better at the time.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
Obviously you have never heard of a non-profit organization before. Obviously you have no idea how the Red Cross operates. Obviously you haven't seen any non-profit try to raise money. Obviously you live in a profit-only world... Obviously you are not a human :(
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Wikipedia.org is the foremost FREE encyclopedia on the web. You haven't heard of it (probably) but it is a very valuable resource. If you don't want to support it, that's ok. But don't go around bashing it without understanding it.
Most of your "solutions" are totally irrelevant here. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. So offering pay services isn't going to work (I mean, what will you offer other than knowledge?) Besides, if you privatize it (that's what you are talking about), it likely will lose since it is nowhere near as good as MS Encarta. They are different things.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Can't say for sure if it'll even out soon or keep growing.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
A free institution comes from socialism and religion. Obviously you have no understanding of it. When someone says an institution (like a library, or school) is free, they mean that EVERYONE has access to it. Anyone can walk into a public library and sign out a book (just have to show ID). Strictly speaking, a library isn't free. People's taxes are used to pay for it. But that's not what we mean by free. When someone says free, it means it is subsidized. You don't have to pay anything if you don't want to.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
What you are saying is true. Wiki will need more money in the future.
Anyway, the VAST MAJORITY of non-profit organizations ask money directly. There are only a FEW that rely on foundations created by wealthy people. The wealthy foundations may seem like to be popular since they make the news (eg. Melinda Gates Foundation) but they account for VERY LITTLE of the money raised by non-profits.
I do expect Wikipedia.org to keep asking for donations continuously from now on (sine they are the #1 encyclopedia site now--meaning tons of users=higher costs)... If you don't want to pay for it, fine. But this isn't a flaw with any "model". That's how all non-profit organizations operate.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Dont you have any idea about how non-profit organizations work ? there is nothing wrong in asking for volunteer donation. Haven't you heard of redcross, greenpeace ..and all? Even GNU and most of the free software projects were (and are) asking for money to continue the WONDERFUL job they are doing for the society. There are people (unlike you) who understand this philosophy and donate money to support all these. Wiki philosophy doenst need any serious thinking as you have suggested. It will go on and on with "passing the hat around". As long as they are doing a good job for the society(like how they are doing now), there will be people to donate money and keep it moving just like there are people to support Red Cross and so many other non-profit organizations.
Wikipedia is to Brittania Encyclopedias what Linux is to Microsoft.
It ia an open-source enclyclopedia. Any user can contribute to it, and many have. Contributors range from interested amateurs to field specialists. Public response tends to weed out (or replace) the most atrocious contributions and encourage the best. In the last 3 years or so, they claim to have gotten about 170,000 entries. If you think that something is missing, then you can always add (or edit) an entry yourself.
In areas of strong contention (e.g. the Middle east, politics, environmantal, etc), I can expect that the wiki record for associated entries may reflects this contention (and might, of itself, be worth investigating). The other 99% of the time, I think you can expect the entries to range from an uncontested reasonable to excelent.
I'm only a beginner, so I'm sure someone else can add more info.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The problem facing Wikipedia.org is not unexpected. As a site becomes popular, it becomes very expensive to run. Asking for $20k is not much. I expect that they will need more donations in the future. I'm surprised they need money for hardware. I would think bandwidth might cost even more. Since wikipedia has enormous potential (it is already the #1 free encyclopedia even though not many have heard of it), its costs will mount. For reference, a political site like antiwar.com raises $100k per quarter (antiwar.com is in the top 10 of all news sites). I imagine Wikipedia.org needs at least that much. It wouldn't suprise me if they need around $200k per quarter if the site becomes really popular (when everyone starts using it).
I think Wikipedia.org should open up their books to avoid criticism. It seems some people think the money is going to be scammed. I suggest that wikipedia.org start posting their financial statements. Since it is a non-profit organization (I think), it should have been doing that already.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
This traffic graph is slightly out of date (stored on the backup server) and only covers the English-language encyclopedia site, which is about half of the total traffic. (The German and Japanese-language encyclopedias are rather well trafficked as well, for instance.) It records about 850k page hits per day.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
excuse me, but that doesn't justify $20k.
The nature of the establishment is irrelevant. If you can't support a free soup kitchen, then don't do one. I appreciate the devotion, hard work and all, but we are in a country that requires money to survive. Crying for help is maybe going to give them enough money for the next supply round but what about the following one?
If you don't make money with what you are doing, either:
1. Be poor.
2. Give it up and find a job.
If you don't want option 1, then give it up. It might be nice and beautiful, but it is unsustainable.
-
You seem to think the choices are:
1. Cry for money and get rich.
2. Be poor.
3. Give it up and find a job.
While it's more like
1. Cry for money and remain poor, but operational
2. Fail to make ends meet.
3. Give it up, get a cushy well-paying job and simply stop caring about anyone but yourself.
They're asking people to contribute a little so they can contribute a lot. Do you really find that unreasonable?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
if i weren't wonderring how i am going to pay next months rent...i would chip in :(
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
i keep thinking that there is an inexhaustible resource in the world: unemployed geeks. while on one hand, the Open Source movement seems to capitalize on this group fairly well... perhaps we can motivate all unemployetd geeks to do something in unison? what do you think?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
The argument generalizes to any number of sources. Conflicts of information between multiple sources require you to assign different credibility values to each source, and weigh them accordingly. The argument then becomes that in any rational assignment of credibility, real encyclopedias are always weighed above Wikipedia, because of the differences in the way they are produced. Furthermore, that because of the peculiarities of how Wikipedia is produced, it's credibility weight is low on absolute terms.
With wikipedia, you have multiple people checking, and if in fact a source such as (a) is in disagreement with (b), you (and others) and check why that is and fix wikipedia to reflect that.
None of this establishes trust for Wikipedia. This would make Wikipedia more accurate. But it doesn't make it more credible, which is the point.
Wikipedians don't just use their own knowledge, they also check other sources. The "random collections of anonymous persons" could very well be getting their information from "experts".
But none of this makes up for the trust issue. It could be even better than you describe: suppose the anonymous people for some random articles were themselves qualified experts for the topic. But since Wikipedia is built on the premise that anybody can contribute to any article at any moment, the credibility associated with whatever experts in fact happen to contribute is denied to all articles. Whee.
In case you are interested, this is essentially the same as the problem of authenticating documents with electronic signatures. There is a trusted information source (an expert), and a document that claims to convey information from that source (the article). I want to determine whether the document represents the information at the trusted source (i.e. it is the opinion of an expert at the topic). But even if the document does in fact reflect the information at the source (i.e. the article is actually written by an expert), in the Wikipedia model in general I have no way of convincing myself that the document does indeed represent that information. The information could come from pretty much any source other than the trusted one. Therefore, even if the document does have the information, I can't authenticate it as such.
--em
Seems like they're having a lot of problems with the Opteron systems, and he seems convinced he should still get another one "for future upgrades".
My ass. He's going to get a lot better hardware quality with a standard machine and a P4 based system. They could get a HPQ DL380 for like $4k with dual P4 processors, high quality raid, redundant network/power/fans/etc...
Instead, he's buying some crappy home-build (practically) Opteron system "because it's cool", basically. Jeesh.
I just donated and I have a nice idea for an additional slashdot filter.
I wish I can add a -6 score modifier to anyone who is too cheap to donate.
I bet that between eating McDonald's, drinking Coke, buying CDs and then paying the bandwidth bills for bitching all day on slashdot about why you aren't going to donate just leaves some people impotent.
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
They didn't post it themselves, nimrod.
Since when is /. the OS community?
/. more relevance that it deserves. It is certainly a place where valuable points of view are aired, but while you condmen a few trolls many other people are actually doing things, amongst others keeping projects like Wikipedia alive.
Since when what a few trolls say has any relevance to what happens to the OS community or important OS projects??
Don't give
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The emphasis has always been on freedom of the code, not gratuity.
Is perfectly between the realms of possibility that somebody gets paid to produce an Open Source software product.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
My opinion of Slashdot's user community, on the other hand, has gone down considerably after reading the sour bitch-fest that some people have been posting.
It shouldn't. A few hours later, and all of the bitching has been modded down. A few legitimate questions and concerns about Wikipedia remain, most with great responses, and all of the naive or ignorant posts are fading into the background.
Don't judge the "Slashdot User Community" by the idiots who shout insensitive, ignorant comments. Judge it by the end result - the overall picture of the story you get when you browse nested comments with a threshold of +3, for example.
Then again, Slashdot does have its quirks. I could have given myself an immediate '+5, Funny' simply by responding to your post with "You're new around here, aren't you?"
My all of you rot in your ignorance and apathy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Once bitten.
Compare with Kuro5hin. Last year, the site owner asked for $70K so that he wouldn't have to take a full time job or drown the site in third party adverts (it has always had paid user-adverts). He promised great things for the site and the code that runs it, and shared a grand vision of seeding a Collaborative Media Foundation with the money. He got the money.
What happened was that he then spent a year kayaking, writing diaries about kayaking, breaking features (search has been broken for months now), adding third party adverts, selling premium subscriptions, and some minor fiddling with the ratings system that has basically made it pointless to rate anything (i.e. contribute) any more. The Collaborative Media Foundation turned out to be a tax dodge, and recently he let slip that he's been doing consulting work full time, and actually cranking up his fees to turn away business.
And it turned out that the site costs nothing to run. The bandwidth is donated in return for advertising, the hardware is donated. The only costs are the admin's time, and the user advertising revenues (when he was still publishing them) actually covered the notional (but completely falacious) $30K salary that he was claiming.
The problem with paying someone a lump sum is that you then have no leverage over them. Sure, the Wikipedia guy might not just go kayaking with the money, but the K5 admin seemed like one of the good guys as well.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Not that anyone will ever get down to reading this comment, but...
I figured, what the hell, I'll send em $10, and while I still had the PayPal tab open, I realized I wanted to look up information on the 'ni' particle in Japanese. Popped a search into Google and the first match was... Wikipedia. I guess a little donating here and there can pay off in the end.
Granted there were thousands of other matches, but if all those matches needed money, and no one gave them any, all the sites would be gone. So for $10, I figure it's worth supporting free information.
Sig!
Jimmy Wales (the founder) donates the bandwidth, the hosting space, and the time of one of his employees for hardware installation, but the new servers are additional cost that's coming from the third-party donations to the foundation.
If he were to just go kayaking with the money and leave us serverless, well you'd hear about it. ;) Wikipedia is under the GNU Free Documentation License, and were there a real reason for it the community could fork the project, taking the content with them and outdoing the original site.
See MeatBall:RightToFork.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
I am ashamed that you are a fellow human being. Crawl back under a rock and stay there, please, for you lack humanity and empathy and any kind of sense for right and wrong.
Why don't you email the marketing and Unix/Linux departments of IBM, Sun, and HP?
.com, Sun Microsystems", etc.
/. effect fine if they have an expensive but solid switch. Maybe they might be nice and throw one in as well.
Tell them about Wikopedia ( which they may already know) and mention how many users and hits you get a month and that you need new hardware.
Its likely they will make a deal with you if you agree to advertise for them or put a "Powered by Power5 AIX" or "Powered by the . in
IBM wants to bring Linux to the power4 and power5 servers and is releasing a new blade powered by them that runs on Linux. X86 stuff is garbage. Things like guinine risc and backplaned motherboards like those in Sun and IBM do wonders where pc's fail. Running your site is what the hardware is tailored to be doing.
Still even if you can get a free 2-4 smp x86 Xeon system, take it! A switch sounds like it may need to be upgraded. They cost big bucks though but many limited servers handle the
Yahoo has the powered by HP logo for Yahoo.com and its quite normal.
IBM would be my first pick and would gladly gloat about how much load their Linux based blades can carry. Your site is a perfect example. Reason being is that many IT managers view Linux on anything non intel as garbage. IBM also has big pockets and your server room is pocket change to them.
http://saveie6.com/
Let's face it, you really don't need that candybar anyway...
Who said we need Wikipedia more than a candy bar?
On behalf of all the folks at Wikipedia, a warm thanks to everyone who's contributed to the project, whether through your labor or your pocketbook!
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
I don't know why they need anything. They do not have much in their database. I went to their site and this is what I saw:
We started on December 12, 2002 and already have -1 entries in the English version.
I figure that I could maintain this database in my head.
LEPP
Money raised: $17,499.16
Remaining: $2,500.84
Stated as of 7:30 AM EST (er this post time)
Great job guys/
are you perchance suggesting that we should invest our hard-earned USD/GBP/EUR/etc in a copy of Encarta?
Anyone else smell Redmond around here?
If a doctor tells him to do that, he'll at least think about it.
If a 16 year old person tells him to do that, he'll just laugh.
That's just the way the world works. Doctors are people who devoted decades to the profession, and people respect their opinions because of that.
It's not about receiving orders from someone with authority, but trusted opinions.
Well, Wikipedia does report on that issue accurately.
Allowing people to view for free but charge them a small monthly amount to submit information is an option.
Like charging a small amount for new code admissions to the Linux kernel? Yeah, I can see that working out just grand...
L
I'm a huge fan of Wiki. It's just good. A bit like google is good.
Perhaps Wiki could enter a symbiotic relationship with the search firms such as Google. Wiki would be run as a non profit organisation and would "sell" it's meta-data to firms such as Google who, out of the goodness of their own hearts, donate to Wiki.
Or perhaps user subscription is the way forward. I would EASILY donate 5 pounds a year for Wiki... Now... how many more will join in. I can set up a direct debit for it and forget.
Once someone has signed up they are pretty unlikely to ever cancel the thing.
"None of this shit works" -W.Shatner
If I'm to understand correctly from the pages I'm getting from Wikipedia right now, the two dual-processor 2+ GHz servers are down and I'm seeing cached, static pages being served off a comparatively lowly P3/866 server.
And it's handling the load just fine.
So am I to understand that the two other servers -- which based on the hardware specs sound like they should still be covered by support contracts of *some* kind -- are there for "redundancy" and for a database that should only get hit when an article is published or a generated e-mail is being assembled? How many millions of emails are being generated per day? I remember 6 or 7 years ago building an app that sent 25,000 database-driven multipart mail messages an hour, on four Pentium 133-class machines. One of which was the database server, and the others were running a creaky 1.1 version of Java.
Please don't tell me Wikipedia normally generates every single page dynamically or that wiki code is getting executed with every page view. That would be mighty stupid.
| I'm always going to Wikipedia -- you can't
| really avoid them, not if you use Google at all.
Hmm. Google's cool people, right? With a lot of hardware?
Not necessarily so. Although I use google and find them to be the best search engine available (with many cool features and tools), the site linked to previously does bring up some issues of concern.
...is that I don't want to see any glass pipes or empty vials strewn around the server room. Damn junkies!
You understood wrong then, and you can't have paid much attention since it's always made clear that open source doesn't have to be free as in beer. The reason that it often is is that one of the consequences of software being open source is that you're allowed to freely distribute it, so it doesn't make sense to charge for it if your clients can then legally give it to all their friends for free.
None of this has any bearing on Wikipedia however, since that's a web site and the concept of "open source" doesn't even apply. A web site isn't a program which has source code and which you can copy or distribute. Even if this "fundamental problem with open source" of yours really existed, it would have nothing to do with Wikipedia.
Wouldn't it be more profitable for Wiki to (...) call itself a collective...
What on earth does it matter what they call themselves? In what way would it solve their problem if they said: "hey guys, we're a collective now, now could you please give us some money?"
They are providing a very valuable service to us all for free and personally I think we (that is to say, we who use it) owe them some help in hard times at the least...
Send PayPal payments to donation@wikipedia.org
Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be over here, looking through your stuff.
I don't post here often, nor do I generally take part in discussions, but I am appalled at Slashdot's lack of sympathy. Instead of giving a buck or two, maybe even five, we have people saying it's worthless(their opinion, not mine, and I don't believe anything is completely worthless), complaining that it's not an authoritative encyclopedia, and many other things. I went through trying to see how many people gave how much... I could only find 175 dollars, and 100 of those were given by a single generous individual! This article has over 600 posts. Averaged, that's about 30 cents. Come on, Slashdot, it's a community effort, and in that it's no different from open source or even Slashdot itself. Community efforts are always an interesting experiment, and I believe this deserves a go at it. We're always harping on free speech, and then turning our collective backs on a utility that allows us free speech, and a chance to change the world a little. A dollar or two from a thousand Slashdotters would provide 1/20th or 1/10th of the amount they're looking for, and if 500 slashdotters gave 5 dollars, that would be 2,500! Say, would anyone like to find out the total dollar amount that's been given thus far?
I have a ton of my own bills (and we didn't spend a ton at XMas either!) - people can send me money too!
Congrats slashdot'ians
Over $23,000 raised for them
http://www.wikimedia.org/letter.html
p.s. 12/29/2003 - Any additional funds received above $20,000 will all be used with the utmost care to further the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation. The more we raise now, the stronger the system we will be able to build to handle our exponential traffic growth in the future.
The incredible success of this pledge drive proves to me that our mission is one that people really care about, and really support. Please consider setting up a 'subscription' donation so that we can have a steady level of support that we can depend on and budget for!
Thye put out the call yesterday, they were still $2,500 short when I donated this morning at about 0800 EST, and now they're up over $23,000. I guess everyone loves Wikipedia.
Perhaps a service like affero (http://www.affero.net/) would be able to send some money in the way of wikipedia. I've never tried it, but it looks interesting.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Red Cross
Don't you think trying to compare the Red Cross with WikiPedia is pushing it a little too far? I mean, as much as I like Wikipedia, I fail to see it as something near the importance of the Red Cross.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Hmm, Truth by Democracy
But you do know that, to a large extent, this is how scientific
oppinions are made
by his peers before judgement of the work itself to significant
details.
I'm not complaining, mind you: one has to have filters due to the
large volume (and variance in quality
It's just that science, which is, IMHO, a democratic system of sorts,
has more accurate metrics for falsehood than political democracy,
and so can eventually fix itself better.
Working for necessity's mother.
Personnally, I woudnl give money to an org that has a very low administrative overhead. You also need to spend money on control, decisions, ... I also dont think you should monitor too much where the money goes. I would much more monitor the goals, the quality of the job (in this case, how usefull is wikipedia).
... I wont give money. If I had found it usefull, I would probably have given some ... but I'll be trusting whoever is behind it to make the right choices. Anyway, you wont do much personnal profits on a found raising of 20'000$
For my part, I've never used wikiedia and I dont plan to use it
For interesting insights on how projects like Wikis can succeed and be sustainable, check this out: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_12/ciffoli lli/index.html ;An article that analyse the matter with a theoretical view.
Sorry that this is off topic, but I need some help.
A few days ago I found this site (memtest86) and wanted to run their program, However they have very few instructions on what you need to do, I have no floppy drive (good riddance)
So I downloaded their ISO and straight opened it up in Nero and burned it. I could never get the CD to boot.
Was there a step I was missing????
Thank you to anyone who can provide assistance.
God bless you for having the courage to wrap the whole situation up into one neat package. You forgot to mention that rusty has spent a lot of time in other parts of nature and made sourdough yeast bread.
I like Wikipedia, so I sent $10 their way. I'm glad to see they raised over $20,000 in two days. I know I'm going to be marked off-topic for this, but while you're in the giving spirit, consider that tens of thousands of people were killed in Iran from Friday's earthquake, with many tens of thousands more people left without shelter, food, or water. Without blankets or clean water, lots of babies are going to die over the next two weeks from exposure and diarrhea.
I donated to Mercy Corps because they are working in Iran and they have a very high dollar efficiency rating, but you could donate to one of the dozen or so charities listed at the bottom left on this news story.
google is a better solution
While you have every right to have whatever opinion about me you want, you've made this "tax dodge" accusation numerous times. You do realize that you're accusing me of a crime, don't you? And that you don't have any evidence of your accusation, nor does it even make sense. An organization that has not yet been incorporated can't function as a "tax dodge."
All of your facts are wrong, but that's just stupidity. I think that when you accuse me of criminal activity, though, you cross a line. I'd really like you to stop unless you can demonstrate even a hint of evidence.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
The web is vulger
You haven't been there for a while, have you? :D
As of a few minutes ago. Good to see. :)
I suggest an article published a few weeks ago on First Monday. It deals with the mechanisms that allowed Wikipedia to survive so far. There's also a discussion about the future of the community: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_12/ciffoli lli/index.html
So, how many times do you intend on reposting this?
Too bad they don't have one.
I'm quite sure I'm not the only person on this side of pond who'd send a few euros in that direction, but doesn't have a credit card.
For small donations, trying to get money into U.S. is hopeless and would end up costing ten times as much as the donation itself.
The point is not that they are of equal caliber; the point is that they are similar organizations: entities that do not make money.
As far as whether wikipedia is as important as the Red Cross, the potential is there. Wikipedia.org has the potential to spread knowledge like nothing before it. It's all a subjective view. I mean, certain segments of the population do not support the Red Cross right now either.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
There have been some disagreements about advertisements in Wikipedia. It was one of the reasons for the Enciclopedia Libre schism.
While I agree with you over the interest of having a free encyclopedia, I would object that for many occidental countries, knowledge is not out of reach anyways. Moreover, Wikipedia is not the only one of a kind. Why saving this one and not the others? Is that interesting that we have multiple Free encyclopedia? And then how many?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I wouldn't take him too seriously.
Sounds just like slashdot.
BTW you are an arrogant half-educated self-important g**k too.
I guess it's escaped your attention that the "admin's time" you so blithely dismiss could be spent at a job earning much more than 30K. The site's running isn't it? If it sucks, it's because K5's users suck and there's not much Rusty can do about that. As far as the CMF is concerned, it would have taken a lot more than 70K to get it going and the simple truth of the matter is that the market and the grant money weren't there. Live and learn.
Search isn't that important - most of what's written on K5 these days is crap anyway so why would you want to search for it? Ratings were pointless from day one - they're mental crutches for feebs that don't have the intelligence or mental discipline to sort out the wheat from the chaff and ignore the latter. (Hear that, Rob?)
Your fellow K5'er
pyramid termite (who's too goddamn lazy to look up his slashdot password just to reply to this)
that's what i love about slashdot: you can reply anonymously to a faggot pussy like pyramid termite and not have to deal with his cock buddies hiding your comment. eat dick you fucking toolbag.
perhaps you should should see a urologist about that ;)
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
It's one Turing Test after another.
PT
Advertising would not work either. One of the main principles of Wikipedia is that of neutrality. Having sponsors would compromise that neutrality. This is the reason Consumer Reports doesn't accept advertisement, and is instead based on subscriptions. Well, Wikipedia clearly can't rely on subscriptions; the whole point is that anyone can read and modify it freely. So, they have to ask for donations. And yes, they will continue to ask for donations, as long as they are in existence, unless they get bought out or go corporate, like H2G2
Public radio stations say, every year, "we need $xxx", and bug everyone that listens about it, until they have made the money they need.
Most public radio station budgets are for the most part underwritten by large corporations, as is public television. NPR is even (gasp!) largely funded by grants from the evils of corporate America (or at least their "foundation" arms), but their policy is to grant no favors to the advertiser, a practice avowed by any respectable media organization. Do the ads on Slashdot bother you because you fear bias?
Radio stations make calls to the public to make up the shortfalls. And public radio stations go out of business all the time because they can't sustain private donations... It often works in the short run, but in the long run it's just not sustainable. That's my point.
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
Again, thanks to everyone who's pitched in to support this project; nobody likes downtime, particularly not on major sites with the popularity of a Slashdot or Wikipedia. Thanks to the generous donations of many Wikipedians and Slashdotters, the next hardware failure that strikes from the blue shouldn't bring us down for two days!
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
This is irrelevant. The whole point behind the discussion is what's the rational choice when you do *not* know something.
If two sources conflict, you should try to find out the possible reasons for the conflict.
There is no upper bound on the amount of information and effort needed to make a principled decision in such cases. What if the knowledge required to adjudicate the conflict can only be learned from what amounts, for all practical purposes, to a medical degree?
Your problem is that you are not considering the time and effort constraints that the real world puts on decision making. If there were limitless time to devote to a single individual conflict between sources, your procedure would be the optimal one. If conflicts between sources occur over and over, and there is little time to adjudicate, the credentials of a source will do a good job often enough.
Are you adequate?
A dictionary definition is credentialed information indeed, but it's not the sort of information that you are assuming it to be. Dictionaries (of the sort you cited) are not designed to be exhaustive guides to the use of the words they define; they're designed to be brief.
Are you adequate?
Wow, you used a word I didn't know: occidental :) Had to look it up...
...knowledge is not out of reach anyways...
I disagree. Most knowledge costs a ton of money. I actually live in an occidental country (Canada) and when I was growing up, there was only one place to look for free or cheap knowledge. I'm working class so paying for books all the time is kind of too expensive. Perhaps for the middle class and upper class, it isn't a big deal. The only place to find knowledge was libraries. With the assault on public socialist institutions by the capitalists (capitalism calls for privatization of everything, including libraries), it wouldn't suprise me if public libraries are privatized within my lifetime. When that happens, the only place to get free knowledge is the internet.
Websites like wikipedia.org are the last refuge of knowledge-seekers that are "poor". With that scenario, I think sites like wikipedia.org have enormous potential to transform society. Do not assume the impact of wikipedia.org (which is apparently expanding to include dictionaries and stuff) is minimal. I always point people towards it when people need some quick overview.
Moreover, Wikipedia is not the only one of a kind. Why saving this one and not the others?
Wikipedia.org is the BEST and most through one I have found so far. If you know of other FREE encyclopedias let me know. I know there are some commerical ones but they might dissapear any minute. I mean, I have no idea how sites like dictionary.com and encyclopedia.com make money, and it wouldn't surprise me if they close down soon. It is imperative that knowledge remains free (although that is a losing battle in a capitalist society).
The only other encyclopedia that comes anywhere close to wikipedia.org is Internet-Encyclopedia, which is very similar to wikipedia.org since it uses the same software and is similar*. There aren't that many encylopedias on the web. Having said that, I still recommend Microsoft Encarta to everyone. That is the best and wikipedia.org comes nowhere near that. For less than $100, you can get an amazing encyclopedia with multimedia content (wiki sucks when it comes to its lack of pictures, sound files, etc). But when it comes to free encyclopedias, wikipedia.org is the only one that matters. Commercial encyclopedias also won't let you quote stuff so if you are not a member you can't link to them from a message post (for example)
(* Side note: It is interesting how internet-encyclopedia.org varies from wikipedia.org. The difference between the two is (apparently) internet-encyclopedia.org articles are written by those SYMPATHETIC to the topic, while wikipedia.org isn't like that. Which is the better approach? )
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Yes.
Is administration time free?
No.
Can rusty do anything he wants with money freely given to him?
Yes, he can spend it in whores as far as I am concerned.
Is he dodging taxes?
I don't know, niether you do, I guess not.
So what is your point?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Heh I REALLY dont mean to start a flame war but thought this might be interesting. Growing up jewish I've had christian friends talk about that view several times -- that faith sort of takes over where fact leaves off. Even had one draw a picture: |_known__||_god_| As if it were a kind of slider, that everything we can't explain we attribute to god, and as we understand more of the world empirically the slider moves more and more to the right. Anyway this is the part that I hope isn't offensive (however feel free to debate of course if you disagree!), but I think that this viewpoint is sort of a byproduct of modern christianity somehow. Even the most conservative, ultra-kosher jew doesn't use faith to explain how the world works. You follow the traditions of your religion because they're the traditions or you believe that's what god wants you to do. There is no conflict between faith and empiricism because faith isn't EXPLAINING anything. Your faith is that this is what god wants you to be doing, not that all heavenly motion is perfect circles or anything like that.
Heh I REALLY dont mean to start a flame war but thought this might be interesting. Growing up jewish I've had christian friends talk about that view several times -- that faith sort of takes over where fact leaves off. Even had one draw a picture:
|_known__||_god_|
As if it were a kind of slider, that everything we can't explain we attribute to god, and as we understand more of the world empirically the slider moves more and more to the right.
Anyway this is the part that I hope isn't offensive (however feel free to debate of course if you disagree!), but I think that this viewpoint is sort of a byproduct of modern christianity somehow. Even the most conservative, ultra-kosher jew doesn't use faith to explain how the world works. You follow the traditions of your religion because they're the traditions or you believe that's what god wants you to do. There is no conflict between faith and empiricism because faith isn't EXPLAINING anything. Your faith is that this is what god wants you to be doing, not that all heavenly motion is perfect circles or anything like that.
If you have seen lots of shoddy Wikipedia articles contradicted by known facts, then you certainly shouldn't trust Wikipedia.
I have worked for a while on Wikipedia now, and I certainly trust the average Encyclopedia Britannica article more than the average Wikipedia article. But over time, you get to know the Wikipedia contributors, and some of them I trust blindly. By looking at an article's history, it is always easy to tell who wrote what.
Now, Wikipedia is barely two years old. How much trust did EB have when it was two years old? I can vouch for the fact that over the last year, my trust for Wikipedia has increased considerably, while my trust for EB has decreased. We'll talk in 20 years.
a corporate sponsor. Or one of the billionarie-based foundations. AKA get off yer arse and do the leg work.
You might want to have a look at http://encarta.msn.com/. While not everything is free, there is a huge amount of content online. I was also thinking about http://www.everything2.com/, not quite comparable to Wikipedia, but pretty good too.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Thank you. Anyone else who doesn't have or doesn't want to contribute money can usefully contribute to some articles covering topics they know about, in any of the few dozen languages offered.
Now, since I'm in exactly the same situation, averaging some 500 edits a month, would you care to thank me as well?
As for the money, it's for the hardware, not the people. The site is around the 1,000th most popular US site according to Alexa and rose about 400 places in the last three months. The new (and faulty RAM) server is a database machine which relieved database load problems which were being experienced at that traffic level. Also freed up another machine to help with the page building/web serving load, so that the site, with all machines working, was reasonably nicely responsive.
There's no sign that the site has hit its peak in site rank yet and raising more money now to get hardware in place to handle the future load is a good idea. Money is likely to be spent on: redundant database machine, more page building machines. Minor other equipment (switches and such) to help deliver more fault tolerance. No guarantees - those are just where the hot spots in load and reliability have been so far. The money will go wherever it's most needed.
Onging development work involves expanding the use of memcached to shift more load out of the database. Also tweaking of the software to cut CPU load. This work still won't avoid the need for more hardware to handle the likely future load.
If you don't believe the money will be spent that way, that's fine. It's been my experience so far that money has been spent for the purposes described and it's my experience that those involved, including both of us, are trying to do the right thing, not cheat people.
The Wikipedia is take two. Take one was an encyclopedia with peer review, written by experts. That project produced a negligible number of articles after a couple of years. The Wikipedia is far more successful and does have experts in the various fields participating, along with non-experts.
Thanks for the back to the failed past proposal, though.
Yes, I forgot that the CMF doesn't exist yet, which just makes you a lazy liar rather than a tax avoider.
If there's any danger that my unsubstantiated opinion might be believed, the remedy is in your hands. Just provide substantiation of your version (pick any version you like) of the whole sordid story. I'm sure Slashdot will be happy to run it two or three times.
Until then, I'll state my opinion any way I like, thanks all the same. I lost any lingering shreds of respect that I had for you a long, long time ago.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
this is correct