Wikipedia Archive

Wikipedia announced today that they have hit the $6 million needed to keep the service going in fiscal 2009 (ends in July). This is certainly great news for all of the Web 2.0 celebs who have pages on the service! Apparently most of the funding will go to infrastructure for, what they say is, the 4th largest property on the Internet.

Founder Jimmy Wales has created a special thank you note on the Wikimedia Foundation website. He notes, "Since July 1, more than 125,000 of you have donated $4 million. In addition, we’ve received major gifts and foundation support totaling $2 million. This combined revenue will cover our operating expenses for the current fiscal year, ending June 30, 2009." Of course he is willing to accept any additional donations you wish to offer and would place them into a "reserve fund".

Svetlana wonders if $6 million will be enough as the amount needed to keep the site running rises each year. She notes, "But this $6 million budget will not be enough as soon as next year probably as the money Wikipedia consumes is rapidly growing from $3.5 million in 2007 which is almost twice the budget of 2006 as well."

I don’t use Wikipedia much but know many who do so it’s good to see the service continue through 2009.

Earlier today Google announced that Google Knol is now open to the public. Danny Sullivan has an awesome overview of how Google Knol works.

I thought this would be a good time to compare three crowdsourced encyclopedias: Mahalo, Google Knol and Wikipedia. Each one takes a different angle on why you should contribute.

Do you participate in any of these crowdsourced encyclopedias? If so, what factors helped make your decision? Was it to help the "greater good" or was it a financial decision?

Here are some thoughts on each encyclopedia and why people contribute to each:

Wikipedia has announced today that at "Thursday, March 27, at 00:07 UTC" the worldwide article count for all Wikipedias hit 10 million. The 10 millionth article was posted on the Hungarian Wikipedia and is about Nicholas Hilliard, a 16th century English goldsmith and painter. Check out the Hilliard article in Hungarian and in English.

If you are a stats junkie, Wikipedia has an in-depth stats archive for each Wikipedia around the world. English and German are the two most popular languages Wikipedia offers.

Place your bets for the 100 millionth article. Maybe it will be about how we live on Mars.

A friend showed me this really weird look-in on Wikipedia — could this be the new version of Wikipedia? It’s certainly not listed on the "Skin" page inside of the user preferences but it is live. I sure hope it’s not as it’s pretty ugly (not that the current site isn’t also ugly) and has lost all of the Wikipedia branding. Perhaps it’s a lighter mobile version? This is all I have for now – will continue to investigate. If you have any information, please leave it in the comments.

FYI – this is a REAL screenshot – I made it myself inside of Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, sat down in London for an interview with the Online Information 2007 group before the conference in London next week. The full interview is available on Facebook and I’ve grabbed a couple interesting snippits below.

Where do you see Wikipedia in ten years?
JW: When I think about Wikipedia in ten years I mostly have been focussing my attention on the growth of the languages of the developing world. So I’ve been to South Africa twice this year so far. I’m going again in November and again in March. I’m really trying to promote the growth in the languages of Africa because right now we don’t have a lot of content there. One of the things I look at when I look at long term trends is there’s about a billion people online now and we expect to see another billion coming online in the next 10 years or so. Not from the US or Japan or places like that- we’re already online for the most part. It’s coming from the next stage- South America, India, Africa. All joining the global conversation.

What’s the future of Web 2.0?
JW: I think we’re just at the beginnings of seeing mass participation and collaboration. I think we’re gonna see things we haven’t seen before- especially in music and video. Particularly I think documentary film is an area people could collaborate on.

Finally, any tips for would-be entrepreneurs?
JW: First found a charity that becomes the number nine website on the internet- it just makes starting a for-profit company a lot easier!

Matthew Buckland out of South Africa has an interesting recap of a presentation by Jimmy Wales last evening. In his recap, Matthew wonders if Wales is planning a competitor to Facebook based on the slides that were shown. The slides were supposed to be about a new search product but Buckland saw it another way. He notes, "the screenshot that Wales briefly showed the audience looked very much like a Facebook profile page, than a search page. In fact it looked pretty much identical to a Facebook profile page. Could this mean Wales is developing a social networking, Facebook competitor too? Could it be some kind of search/social networking hybrid?"

With Wikipedia in the Top 10 of all trafficked sites and most likely larger than Facebook worldwide, a social network by Wikipedia could prove a serious competitor. Built on top of the network already in place on Wikipedia.

Matthew also has some interesting facts about Wikipedia:

• Wales said that by the end of 2007 there were now more than 2-million Wikipedia articles in english now, but that this is less than 1/3 of the wikipedia content.
• German and French are two big growing languages with more than 500,000 articles each.
• Wales says that according to Alexa, Wikipedia is now the 8th most popular website in the world.
• Even in countries like Iran, Wikipedia is the 14th most popular site.
• Despite Wikipedia being one of the world’s top ten biggest websites, it only has 10 fulltime positions, with most of the work done by volunteers all around the world.
• Matthew has the rest of the facts shared by Wales.

Wendell Roelf from Reuters was able to grab some time for an interview with Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder during a conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Wikipedia was able to raise $1 million in donations last year and is expected to spend about $3 million in 2007.

I think Jimmy's quote regarding advertising is spot on considering that they are a non-profit company, "When we're turning down millions and millions of dollars in advertising revenue that could be used, to for example, put computers in schools in Africa … we have to very thoughtful and responsible about why we're doing it."

Wales also spoke about his new search engine expected to compete with Google and Yahoo, "Hopefully it's successful and would provide funding back to Wikipedia." Wendell noted that Wales said last month that Wikia is aiming to take as much as 5 percent of the lucrative Internet search market.

Check out our previous coverage of Wikipedia and the wiki format in general.