Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was on Bloomberg TV earlier this week to clarify that there has not been a mass exodus of voluntary editors. Wikipedia is still very much driven by the community.
Wales also revealed some interesting numbers about Wikipedia. To maintain Wikipedia, it costs around $10 million per year. The website survives primarily off of donations. So far Wikipedia has over $3 million in donations for the year.
Personally I’m impressed by how little it costs to maintain Wikipedia. On a per day basis, it costs about $27,397.26 to keep Wikipedia running.
What about some of the other top websites? As a comparison, YouTube costs about $2 million per day in just storage and bandwidth. Facebook most likely costs close to $300,000 per day considering that they are hosting 10 billion photos. In 2007 and early 2008, Facebook spent around $67 million on rackable servers. Facebook most likely spends $500 million per year between servers, employee salaries, infrastructure, office space, and other miscellaneous costs.
Ron Livingston is best known in the tech community as Peter Gibbons in the movie Office Space. Livingston is having a case of the Mondays (inside joke to Office Space viewers) because someone keeps changing his Wikipedia description. The description claims that Livingston is in a gay relationship when he is actually married to Rosemarie DeWitt. The Wikipedia entry claims Livingston is in a relationship with a man Lee Dennison. Fake Ron Livingston accounts were made on Facebook that claim the same claim.
Livingston claims that the description is completely false and “malicious.” This is why he filed a lawsuit at the L.A. County Superior Court. He is suing for libel, invasion of privacy, and for using his name and likeness without permission. The damages were not specified.
Omidyar Network, the investment arm of Pierre Omidyar’s wealth has made a $2 million grant. Pierre is the founder of eBay and his personal wealth is roughly $3.6 billion. The Omidyar Network was started in 2004 and there was about $270 million in assets given to the investment firm.
Some of the Internet companies that the Omidyar Network invested in include Digg, Federated Media Publishing, KaBOOM, Seesmic, Linden Lab, and Wikia. Wikia is another company that was founded by the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Wikipedia receives about 300 million monthly unique visitors and is the 5th most visited website in the world. However Wikipedia runs on donations and does not have any advertising. At the end of last year, about 125,000 donors invested $6.2 million in helping keep Wikipedia alive.
Of that $6.2 million, $3 million was given by the Sloan Foundation and an anonymous friend gave $286,800. As part of the investment, Matt Halprin of Omidyar will be joining the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors. Before working at Omidyar, Halprin was the VP of global trust and safety at eBay.
For those of you that do not like the current design of Wikipedia, there is some good news. The Wikimedia team is working on a new design for the website and if you have an account on Wikipedia, you can check it out. There is a new beta skin/theme that makes Wikipedia look a little bit more glossier and with less of a traditional look and feel.
Anyone that visits a Wikipedia page will notice a link that says “Try Beta” on the top right. But having an account is required to enable the “Vector” skin. Editing Wikipedia becomes a lot easier with the new beta skin too. The English version of Wikipedia has 2.979 million articles in their database as of right now.
“Have you noticed the “Try Beta” link on the top of Wikimedia project sites? The usability team is proud to introduce the new skin, Vector, and the enhanced toolbar. Well, they have been available from user preferences over a month now, but we wanted to reach out to anonymous users. Please check it out and let us know your thought, if you haven’t tried already,” stated Wikimedia Usability Initiative employee Naoko Komura.
“When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear,” stated a Wikipedia entry of Maurice Jarre. Jarre had passed away in March 2009 and a student in Ireland placed the quote there as part of a hoax to see how far it would go. It went very far in the media.
One of the limitations of being an open source encyclopedia is that it can be an easy target for various hoaxes. In this case, Ireland University student Shane Fitzgerald added a quote to Maurice Jarre’s Wikipedia page that wasn’t actually true. Several newspapers ended up printing the quotes and publishing it on their web sites. Fitzgerald contacted them to let them know it was a hoax, but many of them did not run any sort of retraction.
One thing that I’ve learned about traditional media is that they react similarly to new media. When a breaking news story hits the Internet it spreads very fast like a virus. There is limited fact checking taking place every day.
Jarre composed music for films such as Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India, Ghost, The Message, and Doctor Zhivago.
Wikipedia may dominate the Internet for references and encyclopedic knowledge, but Encyclopedia Britannica dominates the classroom and is hungry to take it online. Encyclopedia Britannica is creating a new online version of their service to include user-generated content. Anyone will be invited to contribute, edit, and enhance their Encyclopedia Britannica experience. The new website will be rolled out in the next 24 hours according to Encyclopedia Britannica President Jorge Cauz.
Not only did Jorge say that his company is taking on Wikipedia, he also dissed Google in the process.
“If I were to be the CEO of Google or the founders of Google I would be very [displeased] that the best search engine in the world continues to provide as a first link, Wikipedia,” stated Jorge in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald. Oh, snap! “Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can do?”
Encyclopedia Britannica has been around for about 241 years. Any changes that are made online will be reviewed by staff and freelance editors before the changes are reflected on to the actual site. Jorge aims to have a 20 minute turn around time to update the site with user-generated changes. Some of the changes will be added to the print version of the encyclopedia–which occurs after year two years.
“What we are trying to do is shifting … to a much more proactive role for the user and reader where the reader is not only going to learn from reading the article but by modifying the article and – importantly – by maybe creating his own content or her own content,” added Jorge.
On the Google-Wikipedia relationship
“I think it would be impossible not to look at Wikipedia when one goes to Google. It’s the most symbiotic relationship happening out there,” stated Jorge. “It’s very much used by many people because it covers many topics and it’s the No.1 search result on Google. It’s not necessarily that people go to Wikipedia.”
Recently Jimmy Wales put up a plea for an increase in donations for Wikipedia. The open source online encyclopedia has reached its goal of raising $6 million in donations. The $6 million that Wikipedia has raised will keep operating expenses covered up until June 30, 2009.
Jimmy Wales stated that 125,000 have donated $4 million in personal donations and $2 million in gifts. The $6 million will go towards bandwidth, 23 staff members, and other misc. costs.
“Any donations beyond our $6 million goal are put in a reserve fund, which will help us to offset operating costs beyond the current fiscal year,” stated Wales. “Your continued support will also serve as a much-needed financial safety net if economic conditions continue to worsen globally.”
Jimmy Wales started the Wiki craze and Wikipedia has always been the epitome of open source, a community of developers coming together to make something great. When Wikia Search first launched in Alpha mode, users did not appear to be impressed, but they were interested in the concept.
Now Wales has fired up Wikia again, but this time it is a more robust and impressive version where anyone that surfs over to the site can vote on their favorite search results based on a 5-star system.Â
Below is a screen shot:
Wikia does not index the search results themselves. The search results are aggregated content by pulling keyword search results from a combination of Google & Yahoo! When a user puts the mouse over a search result, users will be able to vote on the star system and/or Edit, Annotate, Spotlight, Comment, or Delete the result.
I am a strong believer in open source. In Feb. 2007, I wrote an article talking about how Digg could take on Google by leveraging their community-base to vote for search results too. The concept of Wikia turned out to be pretty similar.
Wikipedia monetizes their site by donations, but how will Wikia make money? Federated Media.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was on Bloomberg TV earlier this week to clarify that there has not been a mass exodus of voluntary editors. Wikipedia is still very much driven by the community.
