[Foundation-l] Advertisements?

[Robert Rohde]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 8:28 AM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
> Delirium writes:
>
> >  I'm not sure that's really true. A fork would mainly take editors
> > with
> > it at first, not casual readers, so the initial infrastructure
> > requirements aren't all that large--- It's not as if a fork would
> > instantly inherit Wikipedia's Google rank, name recognition, search
> > bars, etc. Of course if it were a successful fork it would eventually
> > attract a bigger share of the readers too, but it'd have time to
> > grow to
> > meet that demand if so. And there are lots of people who can provide
> > significant infrastructure anyway--- the Spanish Wikipedia fork was
> > initiated at a university, and many universities have pretty good
> > computing infrastructure already in place, especially when it comes to
> > nearly free, nearly unlimited bandwidth. I think a more likely way a
> > fork would fail is that it wouldn't attract *enough* people to
> > become a
> > viable alternative, not that it wouldn't have the technical
> > infrastructure to support what people it did attract.
>
> I think this vastly understates the infrastructural issues. To me, the
> "lesson" of the Spanish fork is fairly limited. Trying to fork
> en.wiki, for example, would tend to fail unless it drew a very high
> percentage of readers almost immediately, and in order to that a large
> number of infrastructural changes would have to take place as well.
>
> I think the Spanish fork actually tends to illustrate the difficulty
> of successful forking, and so I don't think that the threat of a fork
> should be at the center of any policy argument.  Even if you disagree
> with me about the centrality of the infrastructure issue (I don't
> think a single major university would provide an adequate
> replacement), I do agree with you that the difficulty of pulling a
> critical mass of people away is also huge.
>

If we are going to speculate about forking, then I'd like to say that the
fork I worry about isn't from a bunch of distressed contributors trying to
keep Wikipedia ad free, but rather from an internet savvy corporation that
is prepared to build an advertising-supported wiki enterprise on the back of
Wikipedia content.

For those who haven't noticed, Wikia (the commercial wiki-farm started
by Jimmy and Angela Beasely as "Wikicities") is already better funded and
has four times the staff as the WMF and they are currently the 345th most
popular site on the internet with page views amounting to approximately 5%
of what Wikipedia.org recieves.  This makes them an obvious candidate to
finance a commercial fork of Wikipedia, though they probably aren't the only
company with resources and experience to think about attempting it.  For
Wikia the gain and immediate return on investment is obvious since they
could recapture all the traffic they are currently exporting from the
abundant links to Wikipedia that appear in Wikia content.

A commercial fork would have to differentiate itself from Wikipedia on the
basis of features for readers and editors, and while that might be a
difficult task it certainly isn't an impossible one, especially if your
initial goal is to capture only say ~1% of Wikipedia's traffic.  If
Wikimedia allows itself to be stagnant with respect to it's feature
development cycle or only makes do with "just enough" levels of funding,
then that makes the opportunities for a commercial fork all the easier.

I don't know if Wikia will ever try to "eat" Wikipedia, but given the
success of Wikipedia I think it is virtually inevitable that some commercial
enterprise will try to create a full-scale fork from Wikipedia at some
point.

-Robert Rohde