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."

I really doubt it.

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.

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Wikipedia is the "Great Library of Alexandria" of our time.

If wiki is destroyed and only one article can be saved for scholars of the future, then I hope its this one. [wikipedia.org]

Re:I really doubt it.

You want them to save a redirect page?

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I'm sure he meant this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Wars_Holiday _Special [wikipedia.org]

Re:I really doubt it.

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.

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Bandwidth is cheap as dirt. Even a small handful of paid employees would quickly outstrip bandwidth costs. Is that really their main expense?

Hardware, people, bandwidth.

I found a copy of their 2005 Q4 budget [wikimedia.org]. 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)

old numbers

That budget is a year and a half old; wikipedia's traffic has increased more than tenfold over that period. [alexa.com]

Re:I really doubt it.

Bandwidth is cheap as dirt.

So you have experience with very popular web sites, do you? When you need high performance consistent bandwidth it is not cheap. I worked on a popular site whose bill was in the tens of thousands of dollars a month. Wikipedia is extremely fast so you can bet they're paying top dollar.

It begins

The downfall of Web 2.0: people realising that they're providing all the content that's making the site owners rich

Re:I really doubt it.

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 used to be on the board of a nonprofit, and I have a question for you: Would you volunteer to show up to tedious board meetings several times a year at your own expense (travel, lodging, lost time at work and with family), and then sit in a meeting room for a couple of days spending most of the time on tedious topics?

I did. At least I could afford it. Some of our board members didn't have much money, but they found ways to get there and a spot on a floor or couch to sleep on. What made it worthwhile was the good work the organization did, plus the opportunity to spend time with some very cool, like-minded people.

Now I don't know squat about how Wikimedia is run, but if it is like many small non-profits, board members are expected to contribute. Generously. Our board was accused of wasting donations on travel even though we paid our own way. Forgive me if I am sensitive to this issue, but you haven't come close to demonstrating that Wikimedia is using its funds improperly. My experience was that the people who argued as you do had no clue about the organization.

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No offense, but if your bandwidth is costing you tens of thousands of dollars, you're doing something wrong.

No offense, but get back to us when you leave the minor leagues and work on real corporate web sites for the Fortune 50. You're smoking crack if you think they don't spend tens of thousands per month on bandwidth.

Re-read his comment: he never claimed that they don't spend tens of thousands of dollars on bandwidth. He said they're doing something wrong when they spend tens of thousands of dollars on bandwidth.

Where and how you procure bandwidth is a business dec

Re:I really doubt it.

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.

Re:I really doubt it.

Downloads of all the Wikimedia Projects [wikimedia.org]. You need to do a lot of DB work (XML -> SQL conversion, importing, rebuilding tables, etc.)

The issue is simply that massive servers are not cheap. Wikimedia is already at 100+ servers, and they are barely getting by. They could spend half a million on servers and still have a wish-list. And bandwidth isn't cheap. They get a charity discount, and a bulk discount, but it's still gigabytes and gigabytes a day.

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Didn't the wikimedia foundation used to provide a way for anyone to download the entire 25GB+ database for wikipedia?

http://download.wikipedia.org/ [wikipedia.org] is what you are looking for; you can get monthly database dumps for all the wikis, containing XML files

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The data is available as XML [wikipedia.org], but to clone the site you need the MediaWiki app [mediawiki.org].

Re:I really doubt it.

Noone RTFA. The foundation's not in trouble, that was taken out of context. They have four months of cash reserves, which is good for a project that uses that much bandwidth. Good for them. Next time they have a funding goal I'll donate, if I'm employed at the time.

Re:I really doubt it.

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 [google.com] 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.

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So instead of asking you politely, they just forcibly ban you when they see you trying contribute? Gee, that's welcoming.

FWIW, I was contributing in English, not moonspeak. It was my username that was in Japanese (and nothing impolite, either).

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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.

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Correct, and whomever "picked up the torch" would have to face the same problems as the present establishment. Curse living in an economic world.

Or put up ads and make millions [calacanis.com]? Boon living in a Google economy.

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.

Ad

If things were really that bad, wouild it hurt to have a tiny adsense ad?

Re:Ad

This has been discussed recently [slashdot.org]. 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

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.

Fixed it

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.

Google will fund them if nec.

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.

Re:Google will fund them if nec.

Why don't you save yourself some time and just get a Wikipedia search bar for your browser? I used to do the same thing, but got tired of going through a Google search just to wind up clicking on the Wikipedia entry link anyway. Might as well spare yourself the extra steps and have a direct Wikipedia search in the corner of your browser window.

For Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/search-engines.php [mozilla.org]

For Opera:
http://widgets.opera.com/search/?search=wikipedia& x=0&y=0&scope=all [opera.com]

For Internet Explorer:
http://www.google.com/search?q=help+me+i'm+still+u sing+internet+explorer&btnG=Google+Search [google.com]

Re:Google will fund them if nec.

Alternativly for Opera you could go to Wikipedia, right click inside the search box then select "create search". Once you have done that if you want to search Wikipedia simply enter "w" then the search terms into the address bar.

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Two problems with this.

Firstly, Google inserts an advert between you typing the search terms in and getting the link to the Wikipedia article. If they owned Wikipedia then either Wikipedia would have to support advertising (which would be spectacularly u

Wikipedia's fine

I heard the number of donations tripled in the last six months.

Its assets?

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:Its assets?

While the article claims Wiki's assets are valuable, I doubt that.

And your wrong, wikipedia.org is one of the most visited domains on the internet, usualy you just can't buy that sort of exposure.

Solution

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./

Is it worth it?

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.

Re:Is it worth it?

Wait, a game engine is more valuable to you than a vast free easily-accessible encyclopedia? Your priorities are remarkably short-sighted. Do you have any idea the kind of subtle impact Wikipedia is having on society and the economy as a whole? Anyone is capable of quickly getting the basic facts, with usually reasonable reliability, on just about any topic. It's an advance in information dissemination comparable to the creation of the first paper encyclopedia in the 18th century.

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.

This doesn't correspond at all to my experience. But I imagine you only search for computer-related topics.

Be nice to enterprises. Let them advertise.

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 for profit?

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.

crocodile tears and fat paychecks

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).

Almost All of Us

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

Re:Almost All of Us

Let us take a moment to shed a tear for Britannica, as they can no longer charge people $3000 for a set of general encyclopedias.

*sniffle*

There, I'm done.

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I don't know about the printed version of Britannica, but the online version has far more information than Wikipedia, especially on obscure subjects. Britannica Online has 73 pages on the history of furniture. Wikipedia has a few paragraphs. For serious re

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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.

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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.

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I do already contribute *plenty* to citizendium, by contributing articles and edits and money to wikipedia to fund you guys mirroring their content.

Citizendium unforked from Wikipedia some weeks ago. And no articles will pass the approval process on Cit

Re:Google once offered to host Wikipedia

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.

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Old adage: you have to spend money in order to get people to give you the money that they made.

It's punchier in the original Klingon, I grant you.

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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

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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 micr

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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

Re:It's an old saying...

That which is worthwhile survives...that which is not, passes away.

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...