Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
Whatever happened to that?
I heard the number of donations tripled in the last six months.
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
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.
...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)
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
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 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 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.
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.
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
Except that multiple mirrors behind a DNS redirect load balance could reduce the operational costs (HW, bandwidth, personnel) to a fraction proportional to the people helping out.
That's real economics on the Internet.
--
make install -not war
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...
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.
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.
The downfall of Web 2.0: people realising that they're providing all the content that's making the site owners rich
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).
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/
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."