4 ms·

For the scale on which wikipedia operates, it is dangerous to the dissemination of knowledge for them to have a business model. I for one applaud wikimedia for

by edge17 15y ago

For the scale on which wikipedia operates, it is dangerous to the dissemination of knowledge for them to have a business model. I for one applaud wikimedia for not going that route. Furthermore, the quality of the content and the alignment of the motives would be greatly changed, and they would lose the credibility that they have built since the project began. It's certainly not a perfect source, but for better or worse, it has made an enormous impact to the way research is done. They create a much greater value for the world by remaining disentangled from corporate reins. Open source will always be a 'bad business model' if you want to call it a business model in the first place.

_delirium 15y ago
Yeah, that's also their explanation for focusing on diffuse small donors. It's not really strictly the case that Wikipedia is going to go offline if they don't raise enough money--- for one thing, their actual core servers/admins/bandwidth budget is much lower than the overall Foundation budget (which includes a number of ambitious research/outreach/etc. initiatives), and for another thing, companies like Google have offered to donate bandwidth and servers. For a while they accepted some South Korean servers/bandwidth in a Yahoo datacenter, but generally they prefer to remain independent as Plan A.
- edge17 15y ago
  Interesting, I hadn't realized that they even turn down offers for additional resources in place of paying for their own. Wondering if you could point me to an article or something?
  - neilk 15y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-02-14/Google_hosting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20... Here's an article from 2005. I believe they've also offered similar deals more recently.
- neilk 15y ago
  This is correct. It's an encyclopedia with few personalization features, so well over 90% of HTTP requests are served directly from cache. It may not be easy to explain this in a banner ad, but the money is really going to different efforts that are trying to expand / entrench / defend Wikipedia in its adolescent phase. Like: making operations run more smoothly, on more continents, and not require the constant intervention of a few wizards; enabling a virtualization framework which so more volunteers can work with ops or do wilder experiments (the "labs" project); inroads into academia; improving automated testing; expanding our ability to host multimedia; the GUI editor and usability projects; or the Wikipedia Zero project, where we try to get the site delivered to mobile devices in the developing world for free.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    I do like some of those, especially the technical improvements to things like the editor interface, but as a long-time Wikipedian I confess I'm a little bit skeptical of some of the larger ambitions. I think Wikipedia's competitive advantage basically is writing an online, unencumbered encyclopedia, and providing useful data export so others can reuse and adapt it. When it gets into things like the Foundation itself improving education in the third world, there are a lot of complexities where I don't think it really has a competitive advantage over many of the other charities who have been working on that problem for a long time. So if I had my say (which I don't), I'd focus more on making the data more easily exportable in various forms so third parties can take on those missions, rather than Wikimedia itself becoming some kind of global NGO working to bring knowledge to the developing world (a mission that seems uncomfortably missionary / "white man's burden" ish to me in the first place). The situation has improved recently, but for years there was a bunch of hiring and spending on ambitious projects, but what I see as a core function of Wikipedia, the database dumps, which give the free-as-in-freedom practical effect (free licensing isn't that useful if you can't get the data) languished in a pretty poor state (with no full-history dump for a long time), which seems like misplaced priorities. Even today the dumps aren't all that user-friendly, even for technically inclined researchers, let alone less technically inclined adapters/remixers/reusers, and as far as I can tell, improving data export isn't one of the top Foundation priorities.

by edge17 15y ago

_delirium 15y ago

Yeah, that's also their explanation for focusing on diffuse small donors. It's not really strictly the case that Wikipedia is going to go offline if they don't raise enough money--- for one thing, their actual core servers/admins/bandwidth budget is much lower than the overall Foundation budget (which includes a number of ambitious research/outreach/etc. initiatives), and for another thing, companies like Google have offered to donate bandwidth and servers. For a while they accepted some South Korean servers/bandwidth in a Yahoo datacenter, but generally they prefer to remain independent as Plan A.

edge17 15y ago
Interesting, I hadn't realized that they even turn down offers for additional resources in place of paying for their own. Wondering if you could point me to an article or something?
- neilk 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-02-14/Google_hosting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20... Here's an article from 2005. I believe they've also offered similar deals more recently.
neilk 15y ago
This is correct. It's an encyclopedia with few personalization features, so well over 90% of HTTP requests are served directly from cache. It may not be easy to explain this in a banner ad, but the money is really going to different efforts that are trying to expand / entrench / defend Wikipedia in its adolescent phase. Like: making operations run more smoothly, on more continents, and not require the constant intervention of a few wizards; enabling a virtualization framework which so more volunteers can work with ops or do wilder experiments (the "labs" project); inroads into academia; improving automated testing; expanding our ability to host multimedia; the GUI editor and usability projects; or the Wikipedia Zero project, where we try to get the site delivered to mobile devices in the developing world for free.
- _delirium 15y ago
  I do like some of those, especially the technical improvements to things like the editor interface, but as a long-time Wikipedian I confess I'm a little bit skeptical of some of the larger ambitions. I think Wikipedia's competitive advantage basically is writing an online, unencumbered encyclopedia, and providing useful data export so others can reuse and adapt it. When it gets into things like the Foundation itself improving education in the third world, there are a lot of complexities where I don't think it really has a competitive advantage over many of the other charities who have been working on that problem for a long time. So if I had my say (which I don't), I'd focus more on making the data more easily exportable in various forms so third parties can take on those missions, rather than Wikimedia itself becoming some kind of global NGO working to bring knowledge to the developing world (a mission that seems uncomfortably missionary / "white man's burden" ish to me in the first place). The situation has improved recently, but for years there was a bunch of hiring and spending on ambitious projects, but what I see as a core function of Wikipedia, the database dumps, which give the free-as-in-freedom practical effect (free licensing isn't that useful if you can't get the data) languished in a pretty poor state (with no full-history dump for a long time), which seems like misplaced priorities. Even today the dumps aren't all that user-friendly, even for technically inclined researchers, let alone less technically inclined adapters/remixers/reusers, and as far as I can tell, improving data export isn't one of the top Foundation priorities.