Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Wikipedia

Wikimedia Foundation Transfers All Domain Names From GoDaddy To MarkMonitor

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:35:38 +0000

The Wikimedia Foundation domain name portfolio has been transferred from GoDaddy to MarkMonitor. The portfolio transfer was fully completed yesterday. The transfers were done with any interruption of service during the procedure.

Wikipedia is the 5th most visited website in the world and the Wikimedia Foundation cares about who handles their domain names. The legal department at Wikimedia felt that GoDaddy was not best fit for their domain names. GoDaddy initially supported the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was a controversial anti-piracy legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Wikimedia said that they were very impressed with MarkMonitor. Wikimedia has been looking to switch from GoDaddy this past December. MarkMonitor is a U.S. based registrar with an office in San Francisco and is experienced with managing high-traffic domains.

Jimmy Wales Says MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd Should Be Fired

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:02:14 +0000

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.

“Candidly, those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake,” stated Dodd in recent interview with Fox News. “Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

Wales said that this makes the MPAA sound like a corrupt and Congress-buying organization. Dodd also had harsh words for Wikipedia by saying that it was an abuse of power when they blacked out on January 18th to protest SOPA. Wales said that it was successful because 10 million people contacted Congress. Wales said “That’s not an abuse of power, that’s democracy.”

He added “[Dodd] had best get used to it.”

Wales strongly opposes digital piracy, but he believes that Hollywood should talk to Silicon Valley with a little more humility rather than approaching with a Draconian regime.

Greplin Launches Wikipedia Redesign Contest

Riley Kennysmith — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:02:42 +0000

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.

The contest is not affiliated with Wikipedia in any way, so the winning concept will not necessarily be used or acknowledged by Wikipedia. The judges for the competition include Googler Jon Wiley, Milk’s Daniel Burka and Kevin Rose, Dribbble’s Dan Cederholm, Kevin Cheng, Dan Rubin, Johnnie Manzari and Jason Rosoff.

Wikipedia Edits Being Printed In Real-Time [VIDEO]

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 05:06:42 +0000

Wikipedia’s 10th Anniversary from Dean McNamee on Vimeo.

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]

Less Than 15% Of Wikipedia Contributors Are Women

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 22:35:57 +0000

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.

The Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner is aiming to increase the contribution from women to 25% by 2015. Not because of diversity, but because Gardner believes that Wikipedia’s content would be improved.

“Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table,” said Gardner. “If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.” Some of the disparities are quite noticeable. For example, the article on The Sopranos is chock-full of information but each article on Sex and the City has a brief summary of each episode.

Happy 10th Birthday Wikipedia

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:00:46 +0000

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/

Wikipedia Can Now Remain Ad-Free After Raising $16 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 21:25:23 +0000

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]

Banner With The Face Of Jimmy Wales Helped Increase Wikipedia Donations

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 04:04:56 +0000

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.

It turns out that Wikimedia was able to raise in a week what took a month last year. Wikimedia raised a little bit under $3 million in eight days. Last year it took 36 days to make that amount of money.

“I think more and more people everywhere are recognizing the impact Wikipedia has made on their lives– the rapid rise in donations this year is the response,” stated Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson Moka Pantages. “It’s now the go-to place for anything you need to know. These donations are thousands of people all over the world expressing gratitude and supporting the efforts of the Wikipedians who work long and hard to keep this thing alive and growing.”

Another reason for Wikimedia’s growth is because they started using a banner that features the face of Jimmy Wales. In the infographic below, you will notice the amount of donations that were provided as a click-through from their different banners.

[ReadWriteWeb]

Bloomberg Interviews Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales [VIDEO]

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:58:57 +0000

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.

Below is a video of the interview [via BusinessInsider]:

Ron Livingston Files Lawsuit Against Wikipedia Editor

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:12:21 +0000

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.