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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
I went and edited the "Wikimedia Bank Account" entry to say "The Wikimedia Foundation has a jillion gazillion dollars." That should take care of the problem.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
Why would they need money.. the site's Free!
MABASPLOOM!
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
"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.
Correct me if my memory fails me but just recently they managed to raise a million dollars. How much more before the cash donation is considered 'major'? Perhaps the business model is wrong? Depending on how things are set up, a million only pays a years' worth of salary for 25 people. Would distributed hosting by volunteers be a way out?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Whatever happened to that?
I heard the number of donations tripled in the last six months.
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
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.
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.
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Most non-profits have between 0 and a few months of operating expenses "in the bank." Why should Wikipedia be any different.
The only real "cures" to ongoing fundraising drives are to sell services, such as research services, advertising, subscriptions, or other "monetizable" services; raise an endowment; or have outside investment, which means selling out or going commercial. If they go commercial, they could go the Slashdot model, which is a "community forum" owned by a community-friendly commercial enterprise, VA Software.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
...then why do you have a spokesperson?
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.
It looks like hardware is their single largest expense, at $190,000. Personnel takes a distant second place at $33,000. Bandwidth (well, hosting) takes third, at $24,000.
Also, a note at the bottom: So far this is little more than a minimal budget, meaning a budget designed to pretty much just keep the foundation going. What is not included are special projects (content and/or software). Please include ideas for that on the talk page. --Daniel Mayer 22:39, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
This is really, really ridiculous. Every consider asking Jimbo directly? And not relying on networkworld.com for gossip about money issues with the WMF? I mean, the foundation is really unabashed to talk about anything and everything about the organization.
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
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
Heck, Google aren't the only ad supplier on the block. I guess Wikipedia could pretty much name its own terms.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
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./
I wonder wether they have thought about having people donate server-time rather then money. Maybe a screen-saver/background program combined with a part of wikipedia's (often-served)data can help?
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.
I have a suggestion that would save lot's of bandwidth for the Wikipedia Project. I'm usually primarily interested in their technical articles and wikibooks. I'd be willing to subscribe to a service that sent me new dvd's that mirrored said content, rather than aiming my browser at their site everytime. I'm really kind of surprised this hasn't been done already by someone. They have some really good graphics for some of their technical articles, but I know that those graphics really cost.
The other really good idea I saw floated in the discussion above was a P2P model that mirrored the site. That idea sounds very interesting, but I doubt the Wiki admins would be to happy with that idea, given that many of them seem to me to be control freaks.
This also sounds like a ploy to introduce ads. I feel that this would be a real betrayal of trust on the Wiki admins' part, because contributors had previously been promised that commercialization and ads would not be allowed. If Adsense is involved, it also raises privacy concerns.
I do already contribute *plenty* to citizendium, by contributing articles and edits and money to wikipedia to fund you guys mirroring their content.
You do not, because we do not mirror Wikipedia's content. We unforked weeks ago.
Google gets jillions of gazillions of revenue from their AdSense program. It never hit you that every Google project carries advertisement? More space only makes it easier for them to find relevant ads.
[sig]
Thanks. I hope my comment came across as more of a request to consider free knowledge ecosystems than an advertisement. I think a donation whore would've included a link. :) Textual communication is error-prone-- what means one thing to one person often means something else to others.
They embed text-based ads relevant to the text in your mail messages.
Maybe Wikipedia should follow that business model?
VOTE!
It seems to work better than begging everyone for money.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
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
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.
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...
Just because someone else picks it up doesn't mean they'll have the resources to keep it running with the current popularity. If the wikimedia foundation can't get enough donations to keep it running (assuming the claim in the article is true), then how will anyone else?
No, wikipedia won't "die," but it could certainly lose a significant amount of momentum.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Citizendium unforked from Wikipedia some weeks ago. And no articles will pass the approval process on Citizendium unless they can stand up to the rigour and consistency that scholars are used to in their professional work, which means that most Approved articles will bear little resemblance to their Wikipedia counterparts, inconsistent with regards to tone, styling, and references even in the best of cases.
I read this same post in every thread about wikipedia. Now, some example would be more interesting that trusting you on your word, because wikipedia seems as fine as ever, with more and more featured articles, and has become de facto the standart encyclopedia. I have a Encyclopedia Universlais (equivalent to Britanica) and the fact that less people contribute to articles make bias more deranging, make articles far less on the point (more wordy), has no notably more accuracy or less errors, and which DVD edition hyperlinks are leaps and bounds behind what WIkipedia provides. And has no articles on The Simpsons. Hell, why not. Its a friggin Encyclopedia, the thing without which humanity lived for millions of years plus 1800, and it's the best one out there today.
It would seem that allowing a small unintrusive advertisement on each wikipedia page would help cover costs.
Why don't they do this?
I know I am a geek, which is why I use automation where possible.
1. Make a new bookmark to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25s
2. Assign a keyword to the bookmark, e.g. wp
3. Enter the following into your address bar: wp Shortcut
If you want to search for Wikipedia entries in different languages simply prefix the term with the corresponding language code and a colon: de:Abkürzung
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
No really. Comparing Wikipedia with the Library of Alexandria shows you have idea_ Robot.
about the first and are calling the other names with it. The Library of Alexandria
contained ancient to possibly even antedeluvian texts, Wikipedia contains valuable
information such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Life_as_a_Teenage
My Life as a Teenage Robot (as abbreviated) stars a mentally 16-year-old 6-foot tall
robot girl named XJ-9 (who prefers to be known simply as Jenny)...Jenny likes to go
to the mall, fit in at high school, and hang out with her friends Brad and Tuck,
instead of saving the world. Her creator (a.k.a. "Mom"), Dr. Wakeman, designed her
as a highly sophisticated battle robot and wants her to stay away from the human race.
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 would think that the cost of maintaining Wikipedia would eventually be reduced to a minimum. Because the cost of bandwidth becomes cheaper every day and although the usage of Wikipedia is still growing, this will eventually stagnate. If Wikimedia wants to start up new services like Wikibooks and Wikiwhatever they should give proper priority to the original Wikipedia.
These guys just finished a pledge drive that ran through December and some of January which gained them well over $1 million, which they billed as very successful. Now suddenly they are broke? What happened to the million?
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Google's business model is a good idea considering that people's sentiments for Google are better than those for Microsoft. Although Google is a commercial entity and they're making cash (lots) they are giving back many services to people using their huge infrastructure of servers and technology. Microsoft, on the other hand, is considered a greedy company that won't give anything back to its users. For that reason, most of us like Google and dislike Microsoft. Google has the power to help Wikipedia. It's not about flooding Wikipedia with Google Ads in every article, but just some selected ones. It would be a win-win situation.
The downfall of Web 2.0: people realising that they're providing all the content that's making the site owners rich
Rather than fork off and have a half dozen disparate derivatives, wouldn't it make more sense to go distributed? Their 100 servers surely can't hold a stick to most of the leading Distributed.net-style projects. If they can somehow safely break the stuff out of the SQL databases and into static flat-files, they wouldn't even have to do any real development work. They could just promote the heck out of Freenet and move it there. Of course, they'd probably be better off moving to a customized client that lets 'em keep a similar db structure to what they use now.
Sounds like it'd be a much better solution than advertising. Why be beholden to any individual instead of a distributed swarm?
That budget is a year and a half old; wikipedia's traffic has increased more than tenfold over that period.
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
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).
I'm just going to assume the same moron who offtopiced my other reply didn't get this joke.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
So? Any fork is not going to be Wikipedia (the site) and not have the "brand" and traffic that entails. And so what if a few contributors leave? Wikipedia is already the world's largest encyclopedia and besides, someone else will take their place.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
That's not an accurate statement of the problems the Citizendium is facing.
More accurately the Citizendium has been unable to attract and hold a critical mass of people for a variety of reasons including;
- Rapid and unpredictable policy shifts from Larry Sanger. (Which has resulted in endless discussions of how to deal with the latest changes - because they change again before people figure out how to deal with the previous changes.)
When I think about it - virtually all of the Citizendiums problems stem from that one source. Larry wants a community - but he tends the run the Citi as if it were his own property, every time somebody gets a 'buy in', he changes the rules. Worse yet, when he does adopt an idea developed by the community - he presents it as fiat as though it came from him. In his official announcements you'll never see him give credit to others.- Unrealistic expectations by Larry as to how the Citi will function and the nature of both the work and the community.
While we were discussing various aspects of these topics on the Citi community boards, Larry dropped a bombshell on us; "I've spent a long time thinking about these things, and they aren't really up for negotiation". Huh? As the general tenor of the replies to the bombshell went; "Larry, do you really think that you, as an individual, are smarter than all of us and that you've actually considered all the details?". He didn't deign to reply. (That's been an ongoing problem - Larry had a high level view of the Wikipedia, but is out of touch with the nuts and bolts issues.)I could go on in this vein for a while, but I know it was this (and other behaviors on Larry's part) that alienated me and several other - I can only wonder how many others there are that feel the same. Larry treats the Citi as an game where he not only sets the rules, but can change them without notice or discussion.
Pandering
Pandering
Maybe you meant panhandling ?
To whomever is dumping their mod points on this discussion:
I think it's a childish abuse of the Slashdot moderation system to moderate a considered argument that something is on-topic, off-topic. Have the guts to reply and refute my argument, eh?
Just allow banner ads, income assured, revenue comes flooding in.
Would upset wikipedia users though. Can't have everything.
I have written this many times and sometimes people send me flack. Those who do clearly do not grasp what I am talking about.
If one looks at commerce from the point of view of money flows for services, what one sees is that money flows in the OPPOSITE direction of goods and services. As such it facilitates transactions and good things happen.
Now with the net, we have this situation: A web master (or owner of a website such as Wikipedia) is clearly providing a service. Clearly there is no reason for people to even log into the net (much less pay for access) if there is no content they are interested in.
So what we have is this.
consumer {--- ISP {--- telecom {--- (uplink) {--- website (flow of content = a service)
consumer ---} ISP ---} telecom {--- (uplink) {--- website (flow of money)
Note: I would have used left and right arrows instead of the braces but I can't figure out how to coax slashdot's system into allowing me to use them.
What we see is that the telecomunications industry, with their monopolistic and oligoplistic powers is in a position to effectively hold everyone to randsom and bill everyone for their services.
The point is the web content creation industry is actually providing a service, and they should be paid for this service. If one considers the amount of money that flows into the telecommunications industry for instance from the delivery of internet content, the numbers of mind boggling. Yet except for a small number of isolated cases, those who create the content receive no compensation and do not participate in the revenue stream.
As an internet subscriber I have already paid my ISP for access to the content, My ISP has paid their uplink and if they bypass the uplink, then they pay someone else such as Akaimi.
But the website owners? The money flow reverses direction before it reaches them.
This is terribly unjust.
An example of how unjust this is follows:
Consider a company like Telstra (Australia's main telecom).
Telstra with all its power is not able to obtain content which flows through the USA for free. So Telstra pays American Telecommunication carriers for access to content which flows through the USA and Telstra also pays for content which originates in Australia and flows to the USA.
Now consider an Aussie website? Telstra bills them for the bandwidth they "USE".
This puts Telstra in the position of paying American Interests while at the same time billing Austrlian interests for the exact same thing... IE. Providing access to internet content.
Of course, Telstra also bills those who want access to the content.. IE.. the general public. But it is expected the consumer should pay for this access because after all they are the ones who want access to the content comming out of websites like Wikipedia.
I do not know to change the system. I do know I've phoned the head offices of the telephone company that handles the region I live in and I have spoken with the VP in charge of this area. He agrees with what I'm writting here - that its an unfair system. He foresees the day when the Telecommunications industry will pay for access to websites and perhaps will lose the right to proxy and cache the content... because this is making copies (IE. This would be copyright infringment were in not for the fact that the laws were changed to allow the ISP's and Telecomms to duplicate at will). However, he didn't have any idea when this might happen and I don't see the industry doing anything about this unfair system until they are forced to.
In the mean time I would suggest that anyone worried about losing access to the Wikipedia should perhaps look at doing a websuck (wget) and save the content on a DVD. Of course, while a caching proxy doesn't quite work like wget does, from a practical stanpoint it accomplishes the same thing. So ISP's can make the copies and proxy Wikipedia and continue to charge for supplying the conten
- Quickly Updated
- Widely Available
- Includes a large variety of obscure subjects
Cons- Lack of Reliability on Controversial Subjects
- Devisive issues without any true obbjective views
I can just imagine the equivalent of Wikipedia in the days of Galileo or Copernicus. There would not be any objective analysis of the proposition, rather, their entries would be filled with flames, and large swaths of writing starting off with weasal words like "Critics of Copernicus cite the heretical contradictions with blessed truths as put forth by Plato and Archimedes, etc."Instead of citing the axioms of point of view A, then Point of view B, etc. with any analysis of each. It is usually a collection of accusations of heresy in one form or another. Republican vs Democrats. Global Warming. Emacs vs VI. In some cases the only accepted entry is one where one side is constantly sniping at another. feh.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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
What about all the ads they were running for their matched fund raiser? Didn't they raise a ton of cash? Why don't they just sell it to Google for $5BLN and get it over with?
The United States Code of Statutes does not define "intellectual property" as such; each of a half-dozen disparate fields of exclusive rights has to be looked at separately. Copyright law does not apply to raw factual information is not restricted by due to the idea-expression divide (Feist v. Rural). However, the same information may still be restricted by trade secret law, state secret law, patent law, or publicity law.
Wikipedia could still screw the pooch though - the long running arguments about 'Fair Use' images could tear the community in twoHas anyone suggested the compromise solution of making non-free images available only to logged-in users?
Or you could just set up a Firefox Quick Search with this URL.
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/
According to the financial audit, in Summer 2006 they had $500,000 cash on hand and incoming donations of $30,000 per month. In January 2007 the last fundraiser finished with $1,000,000. In their own projection, they say they need $75,000 per month to keep the site running and to pay salaries. Assuming that that same cost was incurred already throughout the latter half of 2006, and that every month in 2006 they received $30,000 in donations but now after the fundraiser additional donations have completely dried up, Wikimedia has now enough cash on hand to operate through April 2009. Of course this assumes that they don't start hiring new people left and right (which unfortunately is in their plans).
"Give me money and I'll let you put your thing in Wikipedia," Foundation says.
... or shut up! Wikipedia could make upwards of $ 100 million a year if they ran ads on their website, whith which they could do some really useful work. Heck, they could hire 100 full-time editors and fork off a real encyclopedia that would blow everything else out of the water within 5 years, while still continuing to run the open project. They could digitize tens of thousands of books a year. Buy collections of media and other artifacts and release them into the public domain. Fund research into non-transient storage media that will keep our information alive for longer than the average 7 years an HD or CD lasts...
The people who are opposed to running ads because they "can't stand ads" or have utterly ridiculous "moral concerns" have their heads so far up their own asses, it's not even funny. Wikipedia has the chance to make a real difference. As it stands, we (I have 3000+ edits there, so I can't really exclude myself) are not fulfilling our potential in the least -- and that hurts.
Richard Stallman had the original idea of The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource, but he intended this encyclopedia to be decentralised. I quote from RMS's proposal:
The free encyclopedia will not be published in any one place. It will consist of all web pages that cover suitable topics, and have been made suitably available. These pages will be developed in a decentralized manner by thousands of contributors, each independently writing articles and posting them on various web servers. No one organization will be in charge, because such centralization would be incompatible with decentralized progress.Wikipedia as we know it today can fail if Wikimedia Foundation can't support the project for any reason (of course, thanks to GFDL, the Wikipedia articles will never disappear as long as people find them interesting). We need a way to decentralise Wikipedia, both financially (right now people donate to the Foundation which then decides how to spend the money), and from a hosting perspective (servers around the world can fail and require a single organisation to manage them. A P2P Wikipedia wouldn't need an organisatiion to support the project). We must find a way to run the project without the support of anyone but individuals caring for the project.
Short version: Wikipedia is nice but having a single organisation responsible for its success could prove problematic someday.
If you think about it, even FSF and EFF, and any kind of formal organisation, could some day be problematic in achieving the spirit of the founders's true goals. Is the present America what the US founders envisioned? It may be close but not exactly what they wanted to create. Unfortunately formal organisations can, in some cases, work in a way against the spirit or the practices of their founders for various reasons (usually for money to support themselves and grow as organisations). When you have a vision and you create a company or a not-for-profit organisation to continue your vision after your death you must know that the organisation you created and the people who will enter into it will inevitably someday have their own interests that may supersede the spirit of your vision. You create a vehicle to support your vision, but the vehicle (and every individual passenger-member) has its own will and its own self-interests.
Of course, it may be the case that the only practical way in the present society to run a project like this is to have an organisation supporting it.
And I am afraid that the only practical way to ensure the continuation of Wikipedia as we know it, is to allow the private for-profit sector support the project in exchange for some (preferably text-based) advertising (that should be clearly labelled as such).
First allow some ads, then try to de-centralise it.
Decentralisation can start by creating a P2P app that would allow any individual to become a "Wikipedia super-node", offering Wikipedia articles for serving to other P2P users that act as consumers (simple nodes).
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."
Just had an idea...what if there was some way to have wikipedia distributed around the net. I'm thinking of something along the lines where volunteer web operators could host an entry or two.
I'm sure there are all sorts of issues but if we had a distributed wikipedia it would be less likely to vanish in a big puff of smoke if the money runs out.
Hereare my other musings on the foundation's financial position. I thought I had these in the same thread, but they weren't.
Shouldn't Wikipedia try getting listed in NYSE through IPO?
Slashdot = Sarcasm
This would seem to be an excellent demonstration project for them -- if they dared!
(This is more of a reply to all the replies to the parent, then to the parent itself, but it had to go somewhere.)
There's a popular Internet saying: "Information wants to be free."
I coined a counter-saying to that: "Information may want to be free, but infrastructure wants cash."
Wikipedia works not because of it's content, but because of it's community. While you may be able to distribute (mirror) the content, a community (by definition) is joined together. Open source projects have their mailing lists. Slashdot has http://slashdot.org/ . And Wikipedia has, well, a wiki.
I'm not saying this is the end of the world, or even the end of Wikipedia. I'm just saying that throwing techno-anarchist rhetoric around doesn't really solve anything.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
That wasn't my account. That was the first of literally hundreds that I found by clicking "What links here" on the block template.
comma
That's not my account. I haven't posted my old account in this discussion. I found that username here. As you can see, I'm far from the only one affected by this borderline xenophobic tendency of many admins acting counter to policy.
comma
How about running ads 2 days a week. Or something like that. It makes them money and because they're artificially scarce, they can be priced a bit higher than usual.
Microsoft has repeatedly offered to fully fund Wikipedia, but its board has always refused the offer.
Google has been mirroring (archiving) Wikipedia for years. The main function of the mirror is to provide data (a lot of it) as a tool for researchers working on natural language processing and semantic linking for, you guessed, improved ad placement. Google also has a specialized search engine for Wikipedia, not currently visible to the public; that is what returns the Wikipedia results in Google searches, not the normal crawler/indexer.
These statements are all specious lies designed to stir the pot.
No thanks—I appreciate the gesture, but it was long ago and I've built up a good enough edit history that I don't think my current account is in danger of being blocked so casually. If you're serious about undoing the damage, a few regexps on this page yields the following:
comma
Welcome to yet another do-no-evil-to-our-corporate-interests.
Why don't they just delete all the un-notable and un-encyclopaedic pop culture, tv show, movie and sci-fi trivia that's filling it up and starting to outweigh the rest. That ought to save a few terabytes, and help focus on what's unique about Wikipedia.
I don't think that a few truckloads of old PIIIs are really what they need. While there might be a way to recycle some old hardware and make it useful, it's entirely possible that it would cost more, in technical time and electricity, to use lots of old hardware in the place of a few units of newer gear.
Let's say they need a database server, which could be accomplished either with a new 1U Opteron box, or half a dozen junker Pentiums; those Pentiums might look like a good deal on the surface, but they're going to take up much more power, produce more heat, take up more rack space, and require more administrative attention than the Opteron.
While a critical look should definitely be taken at all hardware purchases, sometimes just because you could dumpster-dive for old equipment and make it work, doesn't mean you should.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If you are forced to use adds for revenue then the only real trick is to require that you keep ownership and legal control over the provided add space. Any legal deal that requires you to give up control and ownership of the leased space except for your standard allowed content agreement should be rejected. Otherwise you've actually given up control fo Wikipedia and it will not be long before your new owners will be dictating their terms to the Wikipedia community. Also don't fully depend on your add revenue or your survival will be in their hands regardless of your legal contract. You might lose the big boys in the add business with that policy but do you really want to do business with them? Those who understand Wikipedia will place their adds there, the others are unwelcome predators that the community doesn't need!