From: wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Stan Shebs
Peter Mackay wrote:
From: wikien-l-bounces@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)