Jimmy Wales is currently not a fan of the MPAA. The MPAA and RIAA are the two organizations that especially pushed for SOPA and PIPA, which was proposed legislation for censoring the Internet. At the DLD conference in Munich, Jimmy Wales is going as far as saying that MPAA chairman Chris Dodd should be fired as reported by VentureBeat.
The Wikipedia Search Design Contest, run by search engine Greplin, aims to revamp Wikipedia for easier searching and better results. Daniel Gross, the founder of Greplin, told TechCrunch that there’s nothing particularly wrong with Wikipedia, but “that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be infinitely better. The deadline is August 18th, and the prizes include advertising of the winner’s Twitter handle and a trip to see Edward Tufte speak.
Wikipedia hired Dean McNamee and Tim Burrell-Saward to create an art project that celebrates the company’s 10th anniversary. The two came up with a great idea. They took 18 printers and suspended them in mid-air. The printers would then print out real-time mades made on Wikipedia to show a physical record of what the community is working on. Each printed edit gave a one line description of the article and the edit that was made by the contributor. [Dean McNamee via Gizmodo]
As Wikipedia’s celebrates its 10 years of existence, they have hit 3.5 million English articles in over 250 languages. Thousands of people are contributing the Wikipedia’s articles, but less than 15% of that number are women. A majority of the contributors are in their mid-20s.
Open source encyclopedia Wikipedia is now celebrating 10 years of existence. Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales in 2001 and became the fifth most popular website with 410 million monthly visitors (comScore). Within three years of starting, Wikipedia hit 500,000 articles in 50 languages. Now there are 17 million articles over 270 languages. There are several events celebrating the 10 year anniversary happening across the world. You can read about them here: http://ten.wikipedia.org/
The parent company of open source encyclopedia Wikipedia has raised $16 million just in time in 2010. This is more than double the $7.5 million that Wikipedia raised in 2009. Over half a million people donated to the Wikimedia Foundation this year. Supposedly putting Jimmy Wales’ face on the donation banner cover helped increase donations. “Wikipedia is the only major, top-ten site in the world that is ad-free and funded primarily by its readers and users,” stated Wikimedia executive director Sue Gardner. [ReadWriteWeb]
People sometimes react positively when the face of the founder of a company is prominently displayed on their website. In this case, it worked well for Wikipedia. In an effort to raise $16 million for keeping Wikipedia ad free, the company wanted to double the amount they asked for last year.
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.
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.
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