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VIRTUALISATION LCA2009: Getting Wikipedia up to speed
VIRTUALISATION LCA2009: Getting Wikipedia up to speed | LCA2009: Getting Wikipedia up to speed |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Thursday, 22 January 2009 | |
  
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There have been contradictions, controversies and conflicts along the way and some of them were touched on at the Australian national Linux conference in Hobart this morning by Angela Beesley, during the second keynote of the conference. Beesley is the chairperson of the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board and a former member of the board of trustees. She has been a Wikipedia volunteer for almost six years and also runs a company, Wikia, which she helped create in 2004. One of the problems that the foundation faces is finance to keep going; recently it managed to raise $9.3 million and has also received a grant from the Stanton Foundation to conduct research and analysis, simple changes and redesign of the article editor. Advertising on Wikipedia as a means of generating revenue is not a viable suggestion; there are a number of objections to doing so, Beesley said. One was that it would cheapen the encyclopedia, another that ads are annoying, and a third that contributors may desert if ads were put in. There were also privacy concerns, the changing of customers, the fact that ads may be financially unnecessary and the possibility that ads would prove a threat to neutrality of content. But the organisation still needs funds so it has started looking around for like-minded partners. It was striving to reach organisational maturity, Beesley said, adding that the Sloan Foundation had recently provided $4.5 million to pay for the addition of new staff. One way of generating revenue was by selling books which contained subsets of the content on Wikipedia; a second was by selling posters of images that were available on the encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the fourth most visited site, with a quarter of a billion page impressions; it had something like 28 terabytes of rich media available for viewing. But the debate over free content and fair use continues and as corporations try to strengthen their grip over every kind of medium, it will doubtless continue. |
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