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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."
Out of self interest if nothing else. Lots of time when I log onto Google I'm really interested in wikipedia. Based on the order that the hits come back, clearly Google understands that.
You have forgotten that, at least in the short term, many of the former gatekeepers of knowledge stand to lose a lot if their "product" -- i.e. information -- is distributed for free by people with no ownership interest in it. It's not overstating too much to say they stand to lose their livelihood.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
While the article claims Wiki's assets are valuable, I doubt that. Anyone that could buy it and host the files could simply d/l the files and build their infrastructure. So, Wiki's probably worth exactly the resale value of its servers; plus perhaps a little for the url. Since it is essentially duplicatable by anyone with server space to host it there is no value to the intangibles, i.e. the content. Adding to the risk is that all the people who edit and submit today because it is a free, non-ad supported service may decide not to support it if it is bought by someone.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This has been discussed recently. Many, many wikipedians seem to feel that ads would violate their trust, because they'd been assured in the past that it would never happen. I can see how they feel. It's one thing to donate your efforts to something that's purely noncommercial, GFDL-licensed, and has no ads. But if the rules of the game changed, you could really feel that your labor had been used under false pretenses. Therefore, it sounds like putting in ads would definitely cause WP to be forked.
Personally, I don't think a fork would necessarily be a bad thing. WP built the perfect setup for the initial stages of creating a large, low-quality encyclopedia. What they're utterly failing to do at this point is to move beyond that. Moving beyond that stage and finding creative ways to make it into a high quality encyclopedia would require experimenting with the rules, and since nobody knows for sure what rules would work, it would probably require some competition. Right now, that competition can't happen, because WP is in a sort of metastable state, where it's not practical to start up an alternative. Look at the situation Citizendium is in: they haven't even been able to attract enough money and interest to make their fork available to the public for reading without signing up for an account. The problem is that everyone knows that if they edit the WP article on Harry Truman, the whole world will see it immediately; that was always the egoboo that made WP work, and any startup project that tries to compete will not have it. On the other hand, if WP itself was to fork, then people wouldn't be able to sit around in their current rut on WP, running every article through an endless cycle of edits that never lifts its quality beyond a certain level.
Find free books.
I do already contribute *plenty* to citizendium, by contributing articles and edits and money to wikipedia to fund you guys mirroring their content.
Now you here pandering for more than that? What a high opinion of yourselves you must have.
The main guy behind Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) was asked about finances a coupla weeks back in an interview: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg1932 5896.300-interview-knowledge-to-the-people.html
Q:How does Wikipedia manage financially?
A: It doesn't cost that much to run. Last year we spent around $1.5 million, and the year before that $750,000. The vast majority comes from public donations of between $50 to $100. Most costs go on expanding expensive physical hardware, the servers that host the site.
Q: You don't carry advertising. Can you keep it out?
A: I would be opposed to introducing advertising, but we have never said we'll absolutely never run it. The WikiMedia Foundation is a not-for-profit charity and we have goals which we don't have the money for, but I think there are better ways to get revenue.
Q: Will Wikipedia ever be sold to big media?
A: Two years after founding Wikipedia, I donated it to the WikiMedia foundation. I think this is both the dumbest and the smartest thing I ever did. The dumbest because it's probably worth $3 billion - and I don't have $3 billion! It's also the smartest thing I did because it wouldn't have been anywhere near so successful had I not built it this way. So the chances of it being bought are quite low.
So "quite low" chance of a sale to someone...but not impossible. Maybe that bunch who run the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine (archive.org) could run wikipedia...where do they get their dough from?
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Most of the bandwidth requirement comes from people visiting articles to read, rather than edit. if wikipedia were to encourage/redirect users to any of the hundreds of sites that mirror the wikipedia content (eg reference.com encylopedia.info they all sound like that), but which included edit links to wikipedia.org , and bandwidth requirements would *drop*.
All google could buy wikpiedia./
Wasn't there just a topic here on Slashdot about dumping old computers fucking up the ecosystem in Africa or somthing ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I donate to open source projects - but I've never donated to wikipedia. Mostly I base it on how much I'm interested in/use an item/project, and I rarely visit wikipedia - and usually when I do there are other similar google results where I can get the same information, wikipedia just has a slightly cleaner aggregation of it.
That said, the amount of money they need to run is massive - it seems like for the same amount of donations you could fund tons of smaller and arguably more important open source projects. Paying 100 devs $50,000 a year.. or even 50 devs $100,000 a year. That amount of money will buy you a lot of skill and creativity. Give a good project manager 10 devs @ $100,000 a year and I wager within a year or two you could produce an entire open source graphics engine that would rival DX10, just as an example. (Yes, I know about OpenGL, this is just an example) Five projects the size/importance of a graphics engine seems like a far better use of the money than a site aggregating data.
How about instead of discouraging enterprises from creating or editing articles about themselves, provide a space where they can, that is clearly labeled as advertising space.
Let them create their own articles with editing restricted to the enterprise and trusted editors who can help them make it believable (i.e. point out and correct silly amounts of bias etc.).
They get to write their own article in an encyclopedic fashion, it shows up quite high on Google, Wikipedia gets paid.
A psuedo-encyclopedia advert may be an interesting concept.
Has this already been done somewhere? I'm sure I read something like this before on Slashdot though it could be deja-vu
Crap. The 'original model of the Internet' didn't incude the web at all and when the web originated it was as a tool for governments and academics with no 'hint that micropayments would closely follow'.
I'm not convinced it would. FreeNet already exists, but isn't widely used. It should be possible to modify the mediawiki code so that, rather than storing the new version in a DB, it creates a new FreeNet resource containing the new page. If you find Wikipedia useful, run the FreeNet client on your machine and donate some bandwidth and a few hundred megs of disk space to storing part of it.
Thus far, FreeNet hasn't really had a killer application (well, not a legal one, anyway). This could well be it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The unnecessary bile in your remark notwithstanding, this is a reasonable terminological clarification to make, but it doesn't falsify my point.
Btw, on that terminlogy issue, just as an aside: I was using the term Internet in the modern usage, as the thing that was born around 1994 with the birth of the web (which existed for a number of years before in limited distribution but didn't burst forth until the Mosaic browser became widely available around that time). I personally joined the net in 1978 (hence my moniker of "netsettler"), so I'm not unaware of all of this. We just called it the ARPANET back then. There was a transitional time from mid to late 1990's where one might quibble about whether it was called ARPANET or Internet, since the routing technology was emerging.
My points were really directed at the web era, which people call the Internet because they see the Internet Explorer icon on their desk. And I stand by my claim that there was early (read: mid 1990's) talk of pervasive micropayments which just sort of quietly fell away as portal vendors found they could charge for access without having to pass money through to the content providers to whom they were gatewaying paying users.
And even if none of that were true, what still remains of my point after that would still be valid and relevant, which is that it's a choice society makes about what it wants to pay for. We could do things differently in a free society, any time there's a will. Yet modern social patterns are heavily inertial and fatalistic. This tends to support the accumulation of funds in a small number of hands, often through the good works of many individual contributors who themselves don't profit.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
That may be, but I refuse to donate to any organization whose board members use my blood, sweat, and misery to jet-set around the world, hobnobbing with celebrities. I don't care what 'business' they claim to be taking care of.. they can do without.
I already made the mistake of contributing countless hours of my time so they can use it as a revenue generator.
I wonder if the time has come for a more distributed hosting model. In the current model, a site is hosted on a single machine. This can be extended somewhat to a number of machines controlled by a single organization, or even a number of mirrors controlled by a few organization. However, scaling is expensive in terms of effort, time, and money.
What I have in mind is something like a simple daemon program that anyone can run, which caches part of the content of a site and serves it to site visitors. I am sure many people would be willing to run such a daemon for sites they like. I think the system could even be made transparent to browsers, so that anybody could be using it as soon as the system is implemented.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'm a big fan of paying for the things I use. If I don't pay for it, yet still insist on using it then it's going to get funded by sponsors or advertisers or governments or....people who I don't want having control over my information.
So a reasonable micropayment for absolutely every web page I visit would be a welcome change for me. However, there had better not be any advertising or other hidden 'control' on the sites I visit if that's the case.
Direct payments is a very efficient way to fund these things. Consider advertising: The information provider (Google for example) charges the advertiser per view or per click-through - that price is the cost of providing the information I wanted PLUS the cost of serving the advert, managing the advertising department, billing the adverts, etc. The advertiser has advert production costs, profit margins, billing costs, etc. They charge that to charge the product manufacturer - and the product manufacturer jacks up the price of the product to cover the difference (plus the cost of their advertising department). That increased price gets further magnified through profit margins of wholesalers and retailers.
So a payment of $0.01 to the information provider is probably increasing the cost of things I buy by $0.10. A direct payment to the website would be vastly cheaper.
I'd extend this to movies (no more product placement please!) to Television (no adverts!), to Magazines and Newspapers (which would be a tenth of the size if you removed the adverts).
So aside from the sheer annoyance factor of adverts - they are an enormous economic drain.
www.sjbaker.org
As an aside, if Firefox can make money, I'm sure wikipedia can find some way to make money in an obvious-non-evil way. I say this article is classic FUD.
I'm an administrator on wikipedia. Non-latin text usernames are inappropriate because they may not show up properly, and while that's an annoyance in an article, for usernames it can mean a lack of accountability by not being able to recognize the name. The IP block was inappropriate and shouldn't have been made. The username block was intended to force you to pick a new one, and the blocking message includes instructions on how to request a change of username and keep your contributions attached.
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
MediaWiki is a slow lumbering beast. I ran a wikipedia mirror with MediaWiki on a PIII 900 and it was virtually unusable. Just doing a simple redirect to the new server took seconds before I cut out the wiki initialization stuff that was happening prior to the 301 redirect.
Cubia is a lightweight wikipedia mirror hosted on a GoDaddy account. The pages are all split up between 256 tables using the first 2 characters of the md5 encoding of the page title to decide which table the page goes into.
Cubia on the PIII 900 is very responsive.
When costs go up generally it's a good idea to reconsider what your software is doing that requires so many resources. The whole wikipedia thing could probably be greatly simplified to cut down on bandwidth and computing power required if they just dumped MediaWiki and went with a custom streamlined front end.
Work Safe Porn
Devouard's desperate outburst follows by two months Wikimedia Foundation's most successful fundraising month ever, if Wikimedia Foundation's Web pages can be trusted to report even the foundation's internal affairs accurately. Dec. 2006 produced $899,207 in donations -- more than three times the previous record of January, 2006.
Currently reported fiscal 2007 donations from July 06 through Feb. 07 are $1,317,438. That is 7 of 12 months, and if revenues continued at that pace for 12 months, total revenues for fiscal 2007 would be $2,258,466. As I estimated in the post at the root of this thread, based on previous year's growth rates, expenses this year would be $2,077,609. Estimated year-end revenues are still 108 percent of expenses.
Ms. Devouard's comments might be more desperate than the situation warrants, but her anxiety does inspire us to look at Wikimedia Foundation reports. An expanded review of recent Foudation reports reveals that growth in contributors' financial commitments is slowing down. Ms. Devouard might in fact realize that public fascination with Wikipedia has peaked, and the numbers show it. Donations in the first seven months of fiscal 2007 matched the total for fiscal 2006, but were on track to grow at half the pace of the previous two years.
If Devouard and the board (which Wales chaired at the time current expense levels were set in motion) naively anticipated that donations would continue to quadruple year after year, and budgeted expenses based on those unrealistic projections, we need to consider whether a slowdown in revenue increases or an irresponsible board of directors is to blame.
Revenue growth:
FY 2007/2006: 1.730238138 (projected)
FY 2006/2005: 4.461453801
FY 2005/2004: 4.15047311
http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/en/fundcore/brows e/2006
http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/legacy/ongoing/
YOU ARE 100% OK
WIKI should grow and grow..
Why not create WIKEPEDIA DAY when everyone could contribute $10-$100-$1000.... for the basic needs of wiki. ?
Jim
The New Yorker magazine is currently selling an 80GB USB disk that holds the complete run of the magazine, as a more convenient alternative to swapping CDs or even DVDs. (Much of it remains available for conventional use as an external drive.)
At 25GB for all of Wikipedia, this looks like a natural fund raiser. I'd be willing to pony up a premium over the cost of the empty drive plus the content, as a contribution to the site.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."