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Wikipedia On the Brink? Or Crying Wolf?
netbuzz writes "Might Wikipedia 'disappear' three or four months from now absent a major infusion of cash donations? The suggestion has been made by Florence Devouard, chairwoman of the Wikimedia Foundation. And while her spokesperson has since backpedaled off that dire prediction, there can be little doubt that the encyclopedia anyone can edit could use a few more benefactors to go along with all those editors."
Wikipedia is the "Great Library of Alexandria" of our time. And like open source, it will only die when enough people lose interest of it. And that flame is
far from going out or being stomped out by political or social interests.
Didn't the wikimedia foundation used to provide a way for anyone to download the entire 25GB+ database for wikipedia? So anyone could pick up with it. Even if
that's not still the case, the torch would likely be passed onto someone else.
After all, look how long defunct operating systems last.
If things were really that bad, wouild it hurt to have a tiny adsense ad?
Wincopy
"Didn't the wikimedia foundation used to provide a way for anyone to download the entire 25GB+ database for wikipedia? So anyone could pick up with it. Even if that's not still the case, the torch would likely be passed onto someone else."
Correct, and whomever "picked up the torch" would have to face the same problems as the present establishment. Curse living in an economic world.
Because everyone but you figured out how to use bookmark keywords.
If enough people love it, they'll donate. If they can't get enough donations to keep it up and running, then it's either badly managed, or people just don't care enough about it. I only use Wikipedia as a quickie lookup for minor, unimportant things, so I don't donate, and if they blinked out of existence, I wouldn't mind that much. Maybe there are lots of people like me who see it as a mildly interesting curiosity, but certainly not important enough to fork over hard-earned money to keep it running.
I don't respond to AC's.
Perhaps the real problem is that we treat the Internet as if it should not cost money. It does cost money, but it's made artificially bad manners to say so. Money regularly goes to bandwidth providers, but that generally doesn't reimburse content providers. Content providers are taxed for having done the service they provide. When you get a web site, you say how much volume you want to support and you pay rather than are paid for the volume of traffic. Your content users are often outright irate at the idea they should have to give anything back to the people from whom they benefit.
The original model of the Internet included the hint that micropayments would closely follow as a way for web server providers to get paid. But it never happened. Nowadays, when the idea of payment get suggested, the Public treats it like a content provider is getting greedy, but it's really not. Money is nothing more than a way of saying "this is what I value and want to encourage". When you don't pay, you get a system that gets paid by someone else. Which means it doesn't have your value system, it has someone else's. So an encyclopedia rises or falls on the basis of whether it hires good "fund raisers" rather than whether it provides good content.
The whole email system is another example where people don't want to pay a few dollars a year for email, so they pay much more in real money and in aggravation dealing with spam. The cost is there either way. You can't get it out of the system. It just ends up being that since the cost is not directly for the services people receive, people have lost control of the ability to just say simply "I like this, plesae keep it going" or "I don't like this, I won't support it." The simplicity of money and of pay-for-service directly is that it promotes direct involvement of the consumer in what is available.
The indirect models we've all got in which we indulge the fiction that things are free all work toward a model where someone who isn't what we want to consume gets the money and then collectively bargains for us in a way we really have no serious control over. The money by that point has been blended with other money from other sources, perhaps even conflicting with our desires.
I think it's worth a few moments reflection now and then, and surely at times like this.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Maybe because in general companies don't like it when the competition can edit their ads
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Wales is a business man, not a do-gooder. His for-profit wikia.com venture stands ready to replace wikipedia, and with all Wikipedia content under a GFDL license, he has the legal right to do so.
i don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but everything seems to be falling into place for a commercial takeover of the wikimedia foundation. Wikimedia bankruptcy, recent pushes on Wikipedia to remove all not-for-free content, etc. they figure it's time to cash in.
Why not carry ads? Most high traffic sites are ad supported. Google AdSense [google.com] is almost a no-brainer as Google handles the contextualising and geotargetting.
The simple answer is neutrality. Wikipedia entries are supposed to be written from a neutral point of view. It might be difficult to convey a NPOV if you're running ads selling the product your writing about.
Also, with google ads you might have a situation where an article is critical of a product yet keywords place an ad for the same product within the article, so for example, an entry on the Microsoft anti-trust case might also contain an ad for Vista.
I get it. Things like clean air, habeus corpus, and logging-free federal forests aren't worthwhile. I was wondering why they were passing away...
I don't know about the printed version of Britannica, but the online version has far more information than Wikipedia, especially on obscure subjects. Britannica Online has 73 pages on the history of furniture. Wikipedia has a few paragraphs. For serious research, Wikipedia is often useless even as a starting point.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Wait, a game engine is more valuable to you than a vast free easily-accessible encyclopedia? Your priorities are remarkably short-sighted. Do you have any idea the kind of subtle impact Wikipedia is having on society and the economy as a whole? Anyone is capable of quickly getting the basic facts, with usually reasonable reliability, on just about any topic. It's an advance in information dissemination comparable to the creation of the first paper encyclopedia in the 18th century.
This doesn't correspond at all to my experience. But I imagine you only search for computer-related topics.
Creativity and innovation is far more important than mirroring and aggregating content that I can easily find online or - god forbid - in an actual book (Which I can look up online from home if I wish).
Wikipedia in a way illustrates the problem the internet age has thrust upon us - we are too busy gathering and cataloging all the possible information, obsessed with collecting every nuance of unimportant topics. As a result our innovation stagnates. That is the effect I see our current attitudes having on society/economy - wikipedia itself is just an outgrowth of that, and can't really be cited as a major influence in and of itself.
The difference between wikipedia and the first paper encyclopedia is the value of the information (not to mention the questionable veracity of any given section) e.g. Think the difference between an article on the Simpsons and one on George Washington.
I might sound old fashioned, but I'm in my early twenties and grew up on the internet, for what it's worth.
Anyone familiar with public broadcasting should be familiar with this sort of "your silence is killing us" appeal. So they have only four months operating revenue on hand? Many small businesses have only short-term reserves for operational purposes. Many charities support next quarter's activities with this quarter's donations. Even PBS continues to struggle with a desire to fund operations from endowment proceeds when charitable donors don't seem to find the charity worthy of endowment funding. Wikimedia Foundation can get in line with thousands of other charitable solicitors who believe their cause is worthy of big money. Until that money comes in, there's plenty Wikimedia Foundation can do to cut expenses, which have skyrocketed in recent months. First, they can cut payroll, which has grown exponentially in the past year. It could cut expenses such as the recent hiring of a head-hunter firm to select the foundation's next well-paid executive director. That's an odd approach -- wikis are good for writing dubious biographies but apparently the community that is entrusted with the responsibility of compiling "all the world's knowledge" is not qualified to select from among itself a qualified executive director. Then the Foundation could look at its travel budget. Wikimedia Foundation supposedly thrives on volunteer contributions, but some volunteers get more perks than others, including subsidized vacations at Wikipedia's many off-line community-building events. The problem in the travel budget is that Wikimedia Foundation leaders - especially Jimmy Wales - claim the Wikipedia community "knows each other" through online personas. They don't. Wikipedia writers know only the slice of other contributors' personas they choose to reveal. That's not enough to create the critical mass of a community, so contributors, with the Foundation's blessing, created several other venues where core members could conspire outside the collaborative, all-edits-are-preserved, know-them-by-their-work constraints of Wikipedia. And this sort of international community-building, outside the low-cost online venue, is costly. The Foundation has footed much of the bill for building an offline community using donors' cash. Even if the Wikimedia Foundation were to fold, which might not be a bad thing, Wikipedia content and development of MediaWiki software would survive. Wikipedia has been forked by hundreds of other sites. If wikis work, as the founders of WF claim, they can work elsewhere. Chances are, if the Foundation folds, the first company to benefit will be Wikia, Inc. -- founded by Wikimedia Foundation board members -- and which offers free hosting to almost any wiki that can demonstrate public interest. Hosting by a for-profit company would be a more honest approach. Instead of presenting the project as "undoubtably (sic) good" as Jimbo Wales presents wikipedia, it could be presented as would be any other enterprise -- an effort of its principles to advance their social standing (profit) while advancing their individual ideals (in Wales' case, libertarian objectivism of the Ann Rand variety).
Ability to search isn't the only criterion I use these days for deciding whose input box to type into. Data retention policies also matter to me. The idea that Google is retaining search strings associated with IP addresses really creeps me out. Lately I've been nervous about and tend to avoid typing searches of a medical or political nature into Google for fear I'll see them later regurgitated to me in the form of increased insurance rates or someone trying to manipulate my political freedoms, whether as an individual or as a group.
Misspellings or not, I'd rather type them straight to Wikipedia, if only to break up the trail of Internet breadcrumbs I involuntarily leave into different parcels. I've started to use other search engines more often, I have uninstalled Google toolbar, I won't use gmail, and I refuse to let it index my desktop.
I'm starting to regard the centralization of public and personal data by Google as something vaguely like an opt-in, privately managed version of all the things I like least in the Patriot Act. And, little by little, I find myself opting out.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer