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 ..."

Comments

Gah!

[LordK3nn3th]

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....

Re:Gah!

[Junior J. Junior III]

If people can contribute content to Wiki sites, why can't they contribute the hosting and bandwidth in the same way?

It'd seem a logical choice to have wiki hosted in some sort of distributed/peer-to-peer fashion, given the ethos that wiki espouses.

Re:Gah!

[dubl-u]

I'm too cheap to donate, and I'm only 16 anyway...

I'm not! I just sent them $100. It's a good resource, and a fascinating experiment in collaborative content generation.

Remember the excitement about the internet circa 1997? Well Amazon turned out to be a big mall, and eBay turned out to be a big flea market. But the Wikipedia is pushing the boundaries of what the web is. Those of you who miss the exitement of the early days should check it out. And send them a check so you can see how it turns out.

As a software designer, I am amazed by Wikis. If somebody asked me to build a system that would allow tens of thousands of people to collaborate on the same big document, I would have come up with something an order of magnitude more complicated than The Wikipedia and two orders of magnitude more complicated than Ward Cunningham's original Wiki. But they work amazingly well. $100 is a small price to pay for what I learned studying and using Wikis.

The Irony....

[echucker]

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.

you know something...

[segment]

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

Re:Umm yeah,

[NeoThermic]

Hehe slashdotting the site doesn't help it, but it made me wonder...
A quote from the letter:
"The essential problem is that we do not currently have enough hardware to cope with routine failures of any kind. When any one of our machines goes down, we experience cascading problems due in part to the excess load on the entire system."

If their servers are crashing under user load, its not exactly hardware related. I would start by looking to see *why* its crashing, as I would say its more software configuration related. Plus, if you have alot of servers serving one website, a single crash of one of them shouldn't affect the main site in any way shape or form, more over, it should just drop the connected users, much like a netsplit on IRC.

Dunno. I'm not knocking them, but now they are getting slashdotted, I would start to look at the config, and fast...

NeoThermic

Re:Send Us $20,000...

[bsharitt]

When you look up the Vietnam War in my mom and dad's encyclopedia, it says that is is small conflict in that the US is winning.

Doesn't that make it a collective?

[Sean80]

I guess, at the end of the day, this is the fundamental problem with "open source." Although I know there a lot of different interpretations to the phrase "open source," one of the ways that I've always understood it is that it truly is "free" as in beer. If you try and build something that requires money, but don't get any money back for your service, well, you can screw with the laws of physics as much as you like, but at the end of the day they're gonna screw you back.

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?

Wikipedia versus Britannica

[jesterzog]

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.

You might consider Wikipedia's (meta) page titled Making fun of Britannica before holding it up too much as an absolutely authoritative reference.

Re:My idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a look at this about IBM and Wikipedia, pretty neat

Hey Roger

[kuro5hin]

The Collaborative Media Foundation turned out to be a tax dodge

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.