Wikipedia On the Brink? Or Crying Wolf? 380
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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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. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I really doubt it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it needs a P2P-based hosting system to serve up its content. That would be quite the task, though.
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Eh hem. You wanna bet? Don't let those dime-a-dozen hosting companies that advertise terabytes of bandwidth for a few dollars a month fool you.
Hardware, people, bandwidth. (Score:5, Informative)
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:
old numbers (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:I really doubt it. (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I really doubt it. (Score:4, Insightful)
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 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 decision, and business folks aren't exactly the brightest of folks when it comes to technology. Yes, I have worked for an internet company that went through insane amounts of data and yes, they paid dearly for bandwidth and yes, they could easily have gotten
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Call Cogent up and ask how much it is for a 10GB/sec connection. Even from a "cheap" provider such as them, you're going to be paying in the low five figures for monthly bandwidth. This doesn't take into account your edge equipment that you'll need to push that bandwidth.
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Call Cogent up and ask how much it is for a 10GB/sec connection.
Whoa there -- either we're living in entirely different worlds or there's a real ambiguity in the term "bandwidth" here. Where I come from, BW was never measured in "per second" or any such thing. A number like "GB/s" would have been called "throughput". When we used the term "bandwidth" it meant something like the aggregate amount of data shipped in or out over the course of a month. In essence the integral over the number you're quoting.
I've never dealt with a company that put limits on the amount of
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Re:I really doubt it. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Its a beautiful fit. It would give FreeNet a huge boost, and its not pr0n, or war3z, or t3rrorism, or any of the usual criticisms of FreeNet.
Re:I really doubt it. (Score:5, Informative)
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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A page on the Wikimedia foundations page indicates around 200 terabytes a month, but is marked as outdated - I ha
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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 with the articles (or other meta-data, depending on what you are looking for).
Zorglub
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Re:I really doubt it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Surprised?
They have four months of cash reserves
That's fantastic for such a busy site living off donations. To me it implies they can be around for a very long time.
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Q:How does Wikipedia manage financially?
A: It doesn't cost that much to run. Last year we spent around $1.5 million, and the year before that $750,000. The vast majority comes from public donations of between $50 to $100. Most costs go on expanding expensive physical hardware, the servers that host the site
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1. Donations (They seem to get a lot of federal donations/grats as well from places like the Library of Congress and the National Science Foundation)
2. They sell thier technology for backup arhival purposed, ie, you can pay them to have them do a more complete backup of your site on a more regular basis.
Gets me thinking, I wonder if Wikipedia could sell something, though I don't know what... My ideas.
1. A personalized page you own, (problem is corpertions and
Re:I really doubt it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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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.
Is it possible that these rouge admins want you contributing to wikipedia in your language? Granted, they have a funny way of going about it. I do remember the good Captain Wales has addressed concern of there being wikipedia articles in other languages.
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FWIW, I was contributing in English, not moonspeak. It was my username that was in Japanese (and nothing impolite, either).
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FWIW, I was contributing in English, not moonspeak. It was my username that was in Japanese (and nothing impolite, either).
I'm not defending their methods. They went about the issue the wrong way. I'm just kind of curious for the reasons behind this.
Forgot the rômaji? (Score:3, Informative)
So instead of asking you politely, they just forcibly ban you when they see you trying contribute?
They did ask you politely. The signup page [wikipedia.org] links to the article Wikipedia:Username [wikipedia.org], which gives the romanization policy adopted by the English Wikipedia.
I was contributing in English, not moonspeak. It was my username that was in Japanese (and nothing impolite, either).
Was it properly romanized [wikipedia.org]?
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Ok but... (Score:2)
No, wikipedia won't "die," but it could certainly lose a significant amount of momentum.
-matthew
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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To hell with AdSense (seriously).
What more direct way of advertising can I have as a merchant/manufacturer/whatever than picking the exact entries I want my ad displayed in?
I know I'd certainly run some ads there.
- Roach
Re:Ad (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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What Wikipedia needs is some rich benefactors. We know from all kinds of press coverage that a bunch of people with a lot of personal wealth use Wikipedia regularly - the sorts of donations that those people would make would put Wikipedia onto a sound financial footing. But it's hard to predict if or when that mig
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That's why I made it clear right from the start of DocForge [docforge.com] that we plan on using advertising to support the wiki. All revenue will go to paying the bills and eventually anything extra will go to paying editors and writers. We'll also clearly mark advertisements and never have them within art
Fixed it (Score:5, Funny)
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Please elaborate. In what way is the idea behind Wikipedia "pretty noxious"? I'm really curious as to what your objections to it are.
Google will fund them if nec. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Google will fund them if nec. (Score:5, Informative)
For Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/search-engines.php [mozilla.org]
For Opera:
http://widgets.opera.com/search/?search=wikipedia
For Internet Explorer:
http://www.google.com/search?q=help+me+i'm+still+
Re:Google will fund them if nec. (Score:4, Informative)
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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 unpopular with the community) - or Google would have to forgo advertising revenue for any search that wound up in Wikipedia. Neither of those things is particularly attractive.
Secondly, using a direct Wikipedia search instead of a Google search looses you
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Ability to search isn't the only criterion I use these days for deciding whose input box to type into. Data retention policies also matter to me. The idea that Google is retaining search strings associated with IP addresses really creeps me out. Lately I've been nervous about and te
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Keywords are your friends (Score:2)
1. Make a new bookmark to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25s [wikipedia.org]
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
Wikipedia Needs Money? (Score:2, Funny)
Absent a major infusion of cash donations? (Score:2)
Google once offered to host Wikipedia (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Google once offered to host Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Wikipedia's fine (Score:4, Funny)
Its assets? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Its assets? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Bzzzt! I gather you don't do much work in the VC-funded web world.
Wikipedia has massive traffic, massive inbound linking, a massive community, and a well-known brand. Those are huge intangible assets in the sale of any online property. If you compare other recent sales on those
If you're short on cash... (Score:2, Funny)
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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.
Consider asking directly? (Score:2)
Economic Foundations of the Internet (Score:2, Insightful)
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 i
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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'.
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The unnecessary bile in your remark notwithstanding, this is a reasonable terminological clarification to make, but it doesn't falsify my point.
Btw, on that terminlogy issue, just as an aside: I was using the term Internet in the modern usage, as the thing that was born around 1994 with the birth of the
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So a reasonable micropayment for absolutely every web page I visit would be a welcome change for me. However, there had better not be any advertising or other hidden 'control' on the sites I visit if that's the case.
Direct payments is a very efficient way to fund these thing
Why not carry ads? (Score:2, Redundant)
Heck, Google aren't the only ad supplier on the block. I guess Wikipedia could pretty much name its own terms.
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Maybe because in general companies don't like it when the competition can edit their ads
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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
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most high traffic sites are commercial.
most have the good sense to be selective about advertising.
think of the problems if articles on pharmaceuticals are bound to adds for prescription or OTC drugs. the potential for abuse is altogether bad enough in the mainstream press. it is intolerable in an encyclopedia.
Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
All google could buy wikpiedia./
Is it worth it? (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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. (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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The key to wikipedia is not the content - as you correctly point out it is all licensed to enable copying - they key is the regular editors. Maybe a couple thousand up to 10,000 editors - they hold the real
Why no advertising? (Score:2)
Why don't they do this?
crocodile tears and fat paychecks (Score:3, Insightful)
Dump MediaWiki (Score:3, Interesting)
Cubia [dawnofthegeeks.com] 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.
The New Yorker's full run on disk (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Almost All of Us (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Almost All of Us (Score:5, Funny)
*sniffle*
There, I'm done.
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Now you here pandering for more than that? What a high opinion of yourselves you must have.
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You do not, because we do not mirror Wikipedia's content. We unforked weeks ago.
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Maybe Wikipedia should follow that business model?
Re:It's an old saying... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
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Yahoo for asia, and there is a cluster in the netherlands that servers much of europe.
Its just logistically MUCH harder to make it work than cas.