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."

Comments

Google will fund them if nec.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Its assets?

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

Re:Ad

[bcrowell]

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.

Re:WP Fork

[Apple Acolyte]

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. Terrific post. We should be thinking about a fork to Wikipedia because there has to be a competing content model out there that's superior. A model with a superior form of moderation, particularly for controversial subjects. Perhaps, in the case of controversies, more than one version has to be marked authoritative, and then viewers will have to choose which version to believe. And what about a model that offers more user accountability? As it stands, Wikipedia is valuable as a very convenient source for most any type of information, but there must be ways to ensure a higher standard of quality for said information. I'd love to have a greater feeling of trust when I browse articles. Let's hope the Internet community's allegiance to it does not prevent the concept from maturing and improving in the future.

Re:Economic Foundations of the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

The original model of the Internet included the hint that micropayments would closely follow as a way for web server providers to get paid.

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'.

Re:I really doubt it.

[TheRaven64]

Perhaps it needs a P2P-based hosting system to serve up its content. That would be quite the task, though.

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.