It looks like Wikipedia is getting some real problems, and it can cause the closure of the project.
Me: “When we prepared this speech, Florence told me that Wikipedia has enough cash to pay for its server for the next…â€
Florence Devouard: “Three months. Roughly.â€
Me: “and if we don’t do something, Wikipedia won’t be here in three or four months. That’s a radical idea, it’s not going to happen but…â€.
FD:  three months is a bit negative. [...] We have somebody making plans for two years in the future, I think we will survive in the next three monthsâ€.
Via Ballpark.
Anyway, at the end of the day Wikipedia should do what Mozzilla/Firefox did and just have a modest amount of text-based advertising form Google/Yahoo and give users the ability to opt out.
Via Jason Calacanis
Links
Blogosphere, News, Wikipedia
Is there anybody who still denies the computerization of the world? The latest results from brandchannel.com proved that those people are the minority, since first positions of the brand’s research are mostly taken by computer companies or the ones which are related to IT market.
As we can see the breakthroughs of Apple Inc. about moving to Intel based processors and San Francisco conference where Steve Jobs released iPhone moved Apple on the leading positions in the society. Youtube which was bought by 1.6 billion dollars and remains the main video exchange source on the Net. Open encyclopaedia Wikipedia won the sympathies of the public. Google? It’s useless to talk about this giant since every blogger ,at least once, wrote about this company or the services they provide.
Blogging, Google
Apple, Google, IT, News, Wikipedia, YouTube
“It may be the case that non-experts are more cynical about information outside of their field and the difference comes from a natural reaction to rate unfamiliar articles as being less credible.”
While Slashdotters are arguing about this slowly bringing the discussion to the point “do you like Wikipedia or not?”, we can see how popular this Wikipedia project has become, the number of languages the articles have been translated to. And it keeps on growing and improving its content and quality.
A bizzare thing is that according to some of the researches, the articles contributed to Wikipedia encyclopaedia by non-experts are more valuable in case of information mentioned in their articles.
Whether this is better or worse than traditional, expert-based encyclopedias depends on who you ask. Nature did a highly-publicized comparative study between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica last year in which they found that the two were similar in terms of accuracy.
In my opinion, an intuitive way of filtering the information by the person gives more useful data for an article then expert’s view on it. A user can easier identify what kind of data is needed by other users.
etc
Interests, IT, News, Thoughts, Wikipedia
Even though, there are some people who don’t like the idea of open source encyclopedias and spreading the knowledge for free, defending their point of view by the phrase: “Every knowledge costs money”.
But due to the popularity of Wikipedia projects and its contributions, we can see that the majority of people rely on Wikipedia information, and like to use it. In most of cases, looking for some famous person via Google, the first link you get will be from Wikipedia.
Now, Wikipedia goes “offline”, you can download 2500 hand-picked educational articles stored on a CD via Bittorent .
Gadgets, Links
BitTorrent, Downloads, News, Wikipedia