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

Fixed it

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:I really doubt it.

[Short Circuit]

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.

Re:I really doubt it.

[corky842]

You want them to save a redirect page?

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:Google once offered to host Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the offer wasn't quite "no strings". It is not that I am 100% there were actually any strings - but rather google wouldn't or couldn't guarantee a few things.

Yahoo offered servers as part of the asia cluster and said "have them - you can use them as you wish" and the wikimedia foundation said thanks - and they are happily in use. So the precedent of using such help as been set - I presume that google weren't offering something quite as simple.

The wikimedia foundation were being wined and dined by a few tech suitors a year or so ago - but I think the heat has went out of any relationships due to the very uncompromising stance (e.g. china situation) that wikimedia takes (compared to all the $$ merchants who happily censor their Chinese content as the PRC desires) - no content compromises, no independence compromises and no advertising compromises - that is not what the tech companies want to hear.

Hardware, people, bandwidth.

[Short Circuit]

I found a copy of their 2005 Q4 budget. Multiply that by four, and you have a rough approximation of how much it costs to run Wikimedia.

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)

Re:I really doubt it.

[limecat4eva]

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.