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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."
Most open source software doesn't really require money to develop, just people time. Wikipedia requires not just people with time, but bandwidth. Oodles and oodles of bandwidth.
Perhaps it needs a P2P-based hosting system to serve up its content. That would be quite the task, though.
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How can you consider it the "Great Library of Alexandria" when its administrators ban on sight (with no warning) anyone that happens to have a username in non-Western script? It happened to me last year and left me with a great feeling of disgust, not to mention I lost my edit history and couldn't even login thereafter for 48 hours. And a little research shows that even though it's not sanctioned policy (does such a thing exist?) on English Wikipedia, there are enough rogue admins who enforce it as if it were policy—again, without warning or explanation—to turn off a lot of would-be contributors.
If you want to force people to have usernames in English, TELL THEM instead of banning them and then forbidding logins from that IP like a common vandal. IMO, no website so hostile to the outside world can be considered a "Great Library" of any sort.
comma