[Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

[geni]

On 5 March 2011 20:51, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5 March 2011 20:38, Sebastian Moleski <info at sebmol.me> wrote:
>>  the mission, e.g. allow every human to freely share in
>> the sum of all knowledge?
>
>
> Indeed. Although it's quite possible Tobias is correct and WMF can
> achieve the mission with its current budget and staff, I'd like to see
> those who think so give their map of how they get from the goal to the
> current size or just over the current size. Show all working.


Err thats not the foundation's mission though. The real mission is:

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage
people around the world to collect and develop educational content
under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it
effectively and globally.

No sum of all knowledge and not every human.

Which allows us to attack the problem in less absolute terms.

Okey lets make up some figures to play with. $3 million to keep a
stripped down foundation and the servers going and $3 million for
approaches additional to that.

Keeping wikipedia going takes care of most of the collect and develop
educational content part (wikimedia already has the budget of
Britannica and doesn't appear to be doing much content generation).

So time for disseminate it effectively and globally.

Well dead tree is out. It cost gideons $120.9 million to distribute
79.9 million of their bibles.

So digital. A tempting solution is to do nothing. If you have web
access you have Wikipedia. There are groups far richer and far more
experienced than wikimedia developing greater global web access. Much
the same with languages. Of the handful of languages that are likely
to survive with significant monolingual populations for more than the
next few decades the only one I think we are really weak on is Chinese
and that's due to government action and hoodong (some may argue for
Swahili and Hindi but in both cases I'd argue that the fate of those
wikipedias are closely tied to the fate of the languages).

By-passing the web has only limited viability. While there may be
other groups out there like SOS schools prepared to pay for the
distribution of CDs themselves I suspect their numbers are limited and
attempts to do so directly run into much the same issue as the dead
tree problem. I don't believe any off the various offline wikipedia
tools have proven that popular.

A skin targeted at users with limited bandwidth would probably help.
Something like &printable=yes with the pics replaced by links (is
there a way to detect low bandwidth connections and serve that
automatically?) but I can't see that being a $3 million project.

I suppose we could blow a million or so hiring people to talk to the
likes of the peace corps and age concern to see if we could get them
to distribute Wikipedia in various forms.

-- 
geni