From: wikien-l-bounces(a)Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Stan Shebs
Peter Mackay wrote:
>>From: wikien-l-bounces(a)Wikipedia.org
>>[mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Stan Shebs
>Since there
are already mirrors with ads, yes, there are people
>chasing that money now. A high-quality clone that could
compete with
>WP's name recognition would require
significant investment
up front,
and take
several years to establish itself in the public's mind;
Your idealism and loyalty is laudable, but remember that in terms of
quality, a teenager with a bit of Linux knowledge can download the
whole lot for free and get it operational in an afternoon.*
That would be the "low-quality" clone. One Linux box is
easily slashdotted; the current WP installation laughs at
Slashdot, or so I'm told. Our teenager would have to buy 100+
machines and get them all working in concert before going live.
Although they are similar words, "quality" and "quantity" have
different
meanings. MediaWiki is robust high quality software and that's not going to
change whether it's running on a laptop or a server farm. As I noted for
this not so hypothetical teenager "*dealing with success and bandwidth might
be a problem, however".
Getting back to the original point, charging Google enough to keep WP
running isn't going to do much beyond providing an incentive for Google to
put up their own online encyclopaedia. I would imagine that if they were
pressed, Google could get the MediaWiki software and Wikipedia content
loaded and tested in a matter of days, if not hours, and alter their search
results to give their "Googlopedia" a higher precedence than Wikipedia. We
don't have any sort of "big stick" to threaten Google with.
Peter (Skyring)