On 3/12/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:51:11 -0500, you wrote:
Foundations with their assets don't close overnight. Maybe the website might go down, but that'd be a government action, a foundation (board) action, or a computer glitch - a lawsuit would take at least a few days before an injunction was issued. That said, a replacement site could be put up within hours. The community might become somewhat fragmented, though, although I could see some ways in which that is actually a good thing. In the long run a peer-to-peer system is probably what's best for Wikipedia.
Any corporate entity can close down overnight if the money dries up. Lawsuits are a great way to get rid of large amounts of money very fast - actually I wonder if organised crime has ever thought of that? Set up a law office as a shell company and just watch the money chugging down the drain :-) But seriously...
C'mon now, even Enron didn't close "overnight", and I would think the Wikimedia foundation has much more accurate books than they do. If the foundation ran out of money, it would be clear a long time beforehand. And even if they did run out of money, there are lots of servers that could be sold and/or used as collateral for loans to pay for the bandwidth while the encyclopedia gets copied to others and the "no, we're really broke, send us money or we disappear" message goes out).
The h2g2 project never really recovered from "Rupert", the enforced shutdown between TDV and BBC hosting - the community changed irrevocably.
I'm sorry that I have no idea of the facts surrounding that situation, so I can't comment. Was h2g2 released under a free license?
No, it was a community of people drawn to the idea of an online encyclopaedia inspired by the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was started by Douglas Adams in 1999, and a lot of the people who joined were fans, and also committed to the idea of contributing to the Guide (much like Wikipedia). All rights were released to the project, but being British in origin nobody cared over much that the license was not open. The biggest difference between h2g2 and WP for me is that on H2G2 an article had to go through peer review before it became part of the "edited guide". You could have as many articles as you liked, but only the ones which had been vetted by the community were formally endorsed. Otherwise many common themes - user spaces, Talk threads on every article, an aim to be accurate. Differences too
- lighter tone, no anonymous posting.
Anyway, TDV was Adams' company and it went titsup.com during the .com crash. The project was offline for well over a month (it seemed like forever at the time) and when it came back a lot of the old contributors had gone.
Anyway, the point is, Wikipedia is the content, but also the community. Would it survive the period required to assemble new hosting hardware, a backer for the necessary infrastructure and so on, if the foundation was shut down by a court injunction?
In the end I think that having the project matters more than having any one individual article at any one time. Guy (JzG)
I'd be so bold as to say that having the project is a negative in and of itself. We don't have an "Internet Foundation" where anyone can call to get some allegedly biased website shut down, do we?
I suppose in the short term the foundation is a useful entity to collect money from the public to buy some servers and pay for the bandwidth. So far the rest hasn't really panned out. In theory I suppose some of the money could be used to hire people to create content, but instead that extra money is being used to hire someone to delete content.
Anthony