Yesterday around 10:18PM, an anonymous friend donated $286,800 to Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E., the arm of fund collection for Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales’ Wikipedia. As of right now Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E. has raised over $709,000. Since Wikipedia is a non-profit open-source website, all donations are appreciated. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the #12 ranked website, so the server costs are obviously very high for Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, Wikipedia “receives over 2000 page requests per second. More than 100 servers have been set up to handle the traffic.” Less than a quarter of Wikipedia’s traffic is accounted for by non-registered users who are not likely to be article contributors. In the 4th quarter of 2005, the cost to keep Wikipedia online was $321,000 with server costs accounting for roughly 60%.

About 5 days ago, I had found a post on StartupSquad about an upcoming search engine called Wikiasari was being developed by Jimmy Wales. StartupSquad and Pulse 2.0 wrote that Amazon was involved with the project development. A comment by Jimmy Wales himself on our post pointed out that this information was inaccurate. Then similar incorrect information was written on TechCrunch and Mashable.

Now that I know that Jimmy Wales reads our blog, I’d like to personally congratulate him on the large donation that was given to the Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E.

[Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, image source Wikipedia]
[Edit: Please note that my source has a bit of incorrect information. Judging by the comment by Mr. Wales in this blog post, it appears that Amazon is not a part of this project.]

Wikiasari, a combination of the Hawaii words, ‘wiki’ and ‘asari’ which mean ‘quick ‘and ‘rummaging search’ respectively is the name of a new upcoming search engine that will be developed by Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia. The new search engine team is aiming to become a rival against Google and Yahoo!.

The new search initiative is inspired partially by the flaws found in Google search by Wales. “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” stated Wales. Wales had also mentioned that Google is notorious for being a victim of spammers who know how to manipulate the system and have their sites placed high in the page results.

“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” added Mr Wales. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.”

“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” added Wales. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

According to StartupSquad, Wales is planning to utilize similar technology as Wikipedia that involves open source information input by users. The search engine is expected to be released early 2007.
[source: Times Online UK]

Yesterday, Wikipedia announced that they have hit 1.5 million articles generated by users providing the open source articles in the English language. “Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia [source].“ The current total article count is roughly 5 million.

Wikipedia started as a complementary website for Nupedia, an online encyclopedia founded on March 9, 2000 by Bomis Inc., a company in which the co-founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, were a part of. On January 10, 2001, Larry Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki alongside Nupedia. Under the subject “Let’s make a wiki”, he wrote:

No, this is not an indecent proposal. It’s an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. (…) As to Nupedia’s use of a wiki, this is the ULTIMATE “open” and simple format for developing content. We have occasionally bandied about ideas for simpler, more open projects to either replace or supplement Nupedia. It seems to me wikis can be implemented practically instantly, need very little maintenance, and in general are very low-risk. They’re also a potentially great source for content. So there’s little downside, as far as I can determine.

Wikipedia runs itself on in-house created software called MediaWiki which is an open source system coded in PHP and MySQL. The funding for Wikipedia is through the Wikimedia Foundation and 4th quarter 2005 costs for Wikipedia was $321,000 comprised mostly from the cost of hardware.

Recently China had removed a ban on Wikipedia, but has started providing full access to the site again. China had banned Wikipedia for about a year.

Earlier Pulse 2.0 wrote an article about Larry Sanger preparing to launch a Wikipedia rival called Citizendium.

On January 15, 2001, Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia.org, an open-source encyclopedia where users edit or add information on certain subjects.  The project proved to be very successful, but Larry Sanger felt that it could improved.  Sanger feels that the problem with Wikipedia is that users cannot tell when information on Wikipedia is outdated or if data is inaccurate.

This is why Sanger is planning on unleashing a new website called Citizendium.org.  Sanger is calling this initiative an “encyclopedia project” which also will be open to the public, but will be headed by experts on subjects.  Citizendium will be geared more towards users of Encarta and The Encyclopedia Brittanica.  Participating as a contributor will be by invite-only. 

In referring to Wikipedia, “Its content is uneven in quality,” Sanger stated. “In science and technology, the articles are rather good but in social science and humanities, they are rather amateurish.”

Since there were not any real restrictions about who can contribute to articles, a lot of vandalization has been taking place.  “Widespread anonymity leads to a lot of trolling,” Sanger stated. “As a result, the whole system is off-putting to a lot of people, including the most valuable contributors: academics, scholars, scientists, etc.”  Citizendium’s plan is to have contributors use their real names instead of aliases.

Many scholars and editors have been receptive to Sanger’s new idea and have willfully signed up.  This includes Gareth Leng, a professor in Physiology at the University of Edinburgh.  Other professors or professionals that will be able to sign on as a contributor to certain subjects on Citizendium will be required to have 3 years of experience along with other qualifications.  However, as Citizendium progresses, the requirements for contributors will be less strict.

“Those are requirements for the pilot project but the plan is to allow editors to be self selecting,” Sanger stated. “We’ll post the requirements in terms of degrees on the wiki itself and when it is out of the pilot phase, people will be able to make the judgment themselves whether they have the qualifications. They’ll have to link that they have the qualifications but otherwise it’s going to be a very much a wiki. It’s a Web 2.0 approach to getting editors involved.”

Citizendium is a volunteer project and no one is getting paid for this initiative.  Citizendium is currently being funded by donations and Sanger is exploring the possibilities of attaining corporate sponsorships.

For more information, make sure to check out the Citizendium link in the 2nd paragraph or refer to the Wikipedia content on [Citizendium]

WikiMusicGuide (now in Beta) is a portal for an open source community of music enthusiasts. Although currently membership is only by invitation, there are 300 pages in WikiMusicGuide and is still growing.

On the homepage, there is a ‘featured artist’ section, a ‘top songs’ and ‘top albums’ section (pulled from Yahoo! Music), ‘featured upcoming artist,’ ‘current events’ (pulled from MTV), and a ‘what’s popular’ section (pulled from digg). As this web site grows, I think that it will gain lots of traction as there are many people out there that would like to see the latest in music news information consolidated.

WikiMusicGuide also allows users to browse through the pages by clicking on different genres. For example, if you click on “Pop,” you will notice that there are several artists there that sing Pop music such as Hilary Duff, Jessica Simpson, and Franz Ferdinand. The individual artist pages do not contain the same information as Wikipedia.

The only problem with WikiMusicGuide is that Wikipedia has a larger user base and already has a music portal that contains more information. I’m not quite convinced yet to find my music information from WikiMusicGuide, but we’ll see what happens in the future.

WikiMusicGuide.com was created by WikiWebGuide L.L.C. WikiWebGuide is based in Connecticut