Wikipedia could shut within 3-4 months

February 10, 2007 at 11:33 am 2 comments

In a rather extraordinary example of begging for money, Florence Devouard, Chairwoman of the Wikimedia foundation has told an audience at the Lift07 conference that Wikipedia has the financial resources to run its servers for another 3-4 months, and that without further funding Wikipedia “might disappear”.Could Wikipedia shut it’s doors? Tthe site alone would be worth at least $xxx million, if not a billion, after all, there’s literally no better property out there when it comes to traffic and authority than Wikipedia. And whoever bought it would not only have an amazing marketing tool, they could even control the truth, at least as most of us know it. Indeed, the likes of Microsoft wouldn’t need to hire people to edit entries, they could simply pay the new owner. Text Link sales alone across the site would more than pay for the servers the site uses, tens of thousands of times over. I smell a begging bluff on this one, but Devouard did make the claim.

(via Via Digitalis/ SEO Black Hat)

Entry filed under: finance, reference, wikimedia, wikipedia.

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2 Comments Add your own

1. Andy | February 24, 2007 at 10:44 am

Ouch, hadn’t heard about this. They really should consider even a little advertising on the site, so long as they are clearly marked as adverts i can’t see the harm. A resource as good as this is worth it in my oppinion.

I’ve read alot about wikiusers saying they’d leave if it had ads – oh well! If it can’t support itself with the level of donations it’s recieving maybe it’s something they need to consider. I can’t see Google Adsense doing much harm in one bar per page. Reference.com uses advertising and i still find it highly useful.
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2. Manish D Vishwakarma | March 1, 2007 at 4:38 am

Wiki is doing a good job, rather great job. But compaies like microsoft, britanica will like to let it die, so that their encyclopedia could be sold. In this age, I dont think any one need encyclopedia of microsoft, britanica or else. Net is more than enought and there are various sites like wiki, but not the same scale. I hope it survive. Or someone adopt it.
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