tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr!
please reread my message. we have experience with this in the past
(Enciclopedia Libre), and it was moderately successful. as i noted
before, there is going to be such a thing if banner ads are added, and
it is _not_ my personal threat -- i guarantee you, somebody else will
make it.
Mark
On 07/11/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
Successfully forking Wikipedia. Let us consider; to be successful, you
want to retain the international aspects of Wikipedia. This disqualifies
Citizendium immediately as a success. You will want people to edit all
these projects. You want to take the mantle of Wikipedia and therefore
you will need to get programmers to outdo what Wikipedia will be able to
do with all this extra cash. Last but not least you want to take all the
traffic from Wikipedia so you need sufficient servers and bandwidth.
So suppose you make good on your threat and fork. What does it take to
succeed? Hard work, persuasion and money.
Now I am sure you are as much aware as I am that there are many ways
that we can make money if we want to. It is also almost certain that we
can get a lot of money, probably sufficient, for quit some time to go
without adverts. When there is no option we can even opt to have
voluntary adds, where "die hards" like you can opt out of having adds
for the time that it takes to get the advertisement money needed to keep
going.
Then again there are organisations quite happy to support the Wikimedia
Foundation to continue doing what is does so well. There are
organisations like Kennisnet that have helped us a lot. There are many
more such organisations that would help out if asked in the right way
for them. The question would be, is this advertisement, partnering or
cooperation? Would we be willing to say and would we be able to say
thank you?
Many organisations have big amounts of what is currently proprietary
content, when we find it in ourselves to work together with
organisations we could get much of this content opened up, freed for all
to use. Sometimes what is required are small changes to our practices,
for instance what would happen if we always attribute pictures of art
that is in the public domain to the organisation that has it in it's
collection ?? It would be informative and people would know what museum
to go to see some magnificent art. You know what, this would cost us
nothing and don't you think this would work for many, many museums?
When you are able to figure out what functionality we need, you may find
that there are subsidies, grants available just for those needs. We
could work together with students and scientists that do this as their
research. We could propose the functionality for the educational value
that we would provide. One of the requirements of many of these grants
is that we do this in a sustainable way. Guess what, sustaining itself
on a shoestring is what the Wikimedia Foundation has proven to be good
at. But for sustaining what we have, we have yet another reason to ask
for a grant, subsidy or donation.
The upshot; we do not need a fork to do well. What we need is to do more
of what we do well. What we need is staying personable and become more
collaborative. We can do it, we just need to be convinced that we can
and that we should.
Thanks,
GerardM
Mark Williamson wrote:
Again, to
be clear, this has nothing to do with AOL or Jason Calacanis'
idea of slapping banner ads on Wikipedia.
This might not be a bad time for people to start mulling that over... :)
You mean, for people to start mulling over the idea of slapping banner
ads on Wikipedia?
I would expect a major, major disaster. Probably a huge fork. And
unlike the one or two forks I've threatened in the past, this one
would probably _not_ be initiated by myself, given the fact that I'm
not extremely active anymore (I'm doing more work on reconsidering
definitions for urbandictionary -- it's much clearer when something is
crap there than it is on Wikipedia because they have clear guidelines
and you can delete stuff or keep it without having to worry about
improving existing content, though I do regret their lack of
non-English versions and believe they would benefit from a more
wiki-like structure).
But yeah, do we not remember Enciclopedia Libre? That happened just
because people were thinking about maybe possibly sometime in the
future eventually having banner ads, IIRC. To actually implement
them... wow... yeah.
But if it's a sacrifice you ("we") are willing to make in the name of
the almighty dollar (even if you're going to use it for good rather
than evil), well then, whatever floats your ("our") boat.
Mark
On 06/11/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
> Steve wrote:
>
>> Liberatory 100M.
>>
> A lot of good ideas of stuff we want were collected. There is no
> further news at this time, but remember... this is not about a donation,
> but someone trying to think of sustainable business models around doing
> content liberation in conjunction with Wikipedia... it is one thing to
> imagine someone deciding to donate that much money to the movement, but
> another thing altogether to think about someone doing something
> sustainable (i.e. where they can recoup their investment).
>
Again, to be clear, this has nothing to do with
AOL or Jason Calacanis'
idea of slapping banner ads on Wikipedia.
This might not be a bad time for people to start mulling that over... :)
> --Jimbo
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l