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Wikimedia

Wikimedia is a super project of free content and a wiki engine called MediaWiki that runs them. The Wikimedia wiki projects so far include (oldest first): Wikipedia, Sep11wiki, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, and Wikisource. Coordination between all Wikimedia projects, including MediaWiki, is performed here on Meta and on the various mailing lists. The name Wikimedia is a portmanteau of wiki and multimedia, although all the Wikimedia projects so far are heavily dominated by one medium: text.

The Wikimedia Foundation (wikimediafoundation.org) is the over-arching nonprofit foundation that owns the Wikimedia servers along with the domain names and trademarks of all Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki. Contributors, however, own the content and the GNU FDL license used on these projects prevents anyone from controling the content.

Table of contents

1 History
2 Organization
3 Financial situation

3.1 Income

3.1.1 Wikipedia 1.0

3.2 Liabilities

3.2.2 Bandwidth
3.2.3 People
3.2.4 Domain registrations
3.2.5 Other expenses

4 Current issues
5 Hardware
6 Random thoughts on what Wikimedia might mean

6.3 How to make audio and video wikilike?

7 Technical issues

7.4 CD/DVD distribution
7.5 Bandwidth

History

The early history of Wikipedia was characterized by much chaos, well-meaning strangeness. Wikipedia Governance was conducted, effectively, by Jim Wales alone, with the assistance of mailing list participants.

The broader mandate of the expanding projects being considered, led to a suggestion in a wikien-l message by Sheldon Rampton:

I think we should go further still and shoot for the ultimate goal of creating "Wikimedia." That's media with an "m." It would use Wiki-style rules to enable public participation in the creation and editing of all kinds of media: encyclopedias and other reference works, current news, books, fiction, music, video etc. Like current broadcast media, it would have differentiated "channels" and "programs," each with self-selecting audiences. Unlike current media, however, the audience would also be actively involved in creating its own programming, instead of merely passively watching it.

The "wikimedia.org" domain name was purchased by in waiting for a Wikipedia/Wikimedia non-profit to come into existence to own it.)

On June 20, 2003 Jimbo announced the creation of the Wikimedia Foundation which will serve as the parent, non-profit, organization of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, , , and future wiki/FDL projects we add to the "Wikimedia family". See also the Wikipedia article on Wikimedia: .

Organization

The bylaws of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. have been posted on the Foundation's main web site: http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/bylaws.pdf (local meta copy). A Wikimedia board must exist, by law, to manage the nonprofit and supervise the disposition and solicitation of nonprofit donations. It is known as the Board of Trustees. A Wikimedia board manual would assist this board in carrying out their supervisory responsibilities over the various Wikimedia projects.

Financial situation

Income

As of July, 2004, Wikipedia is funded exclusively through private donations. For some time, there has been discussion on finding alternate means income. Some have suggested we seek grants, or sell WikiReaders. Jimbo has said that, for the time being, he wants Wikipedia to remain free of advertisement. There has also been discussion of selling a print version of Wikipedia, called Wikipedia 1.0 (see below).

See Wikimedia Fundraising page for current account balances.
See Making Wikipedia profitable for a discussion of general methods for raising funds for Wikipedia
- For a specific discussion of raising funds from corporations, see Corporate sponsorship

Wikipedia 1.0

wrote:

As we move towards 1.0 and explore the idea of going to print/cd/etc., there will likely be some *investment* needed, but that investment will (one hopes) be fully returned. Whether that investment takes place inside the Wikimedia Foundation vehicle, or separately, is something we can decide.

Let me be specific. I'd like to distribute cheaply-printed paperback copies of Wikipedia to every school in every country in Africa, in English or French as the local circumstances dictate. (I'd prefer native tongues, of course, but en and fr are more likely to be ready and useful soon.)

When the time comes, I'd like to put together a budget for that concept, and then go get funding for it, either from the general public, or from someone like Oprah Winfrey who has taken an interest in major projects of that kind. (Or possibly even governments, although as I have said, I have some real qualms about us using tax money.)

Let's say this comes to 100,000 copies of 1.0 @ ($3 mass printing + $1 shipping within the US), distributed overseas for free via arrangements w/ the Red Cross and Peace Corps. Add $50,000 to cover expenses and salary for each of two multilingual coordinators for the project for ~1 year, and you can float this idea on a half-mil shoestring. 08:59, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Investment in 2004 for such a project, given current 1.0 projections, would probably be at most an initial payment for preproduction of the book. If layout and prufing (and mockups for fundraising) are all handled by Wikipedians, this might not even be required. 09:08, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Think of the trees! - 04:20, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

Liabilities

Bandwidth

wrote:

I anticipate that Wikipedia will spend $0 on bandwidth in 2004. I'll continue to cover that for the foreseeable future. Traffic tripling should not be a problem for me, but if we get into 10x our current traffic levels, I'll start whining a bit.

(This is all making certain assumptions about bandwidth consumption, pricing, my financial situation otherwise, and what-not. This is not a promise, just a forecast!)

People

Is a server admin needed?

I anticipate that Wikipedia *needs* to spend $0 on people in 2004. Again, although Jason is a paid employee, he works for Bomis, and Bomis will absorb his costs as usual.

There is an idea that we could *benefit* from paying for some server admin costs, and I think that's right.

Which is to say, WP doesn't need to spend anything, but might want to? You might be able to find someone who loves the project, lives near the colo, and is willing to be kept on retainer and on call for $1k/mo, expecting about 40 hrs of admin work and a few frantic phonecalls each month in the bargain. 09:05, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

You could definitely find someone with those qualities. - Anthony DiPierro

Domain registrations

Probably no more than $1,000.

Other expenses

There will likely be some expenses associated with setting up a European foundation, although we have a pro bono French attorney sort of lined up.
There will be some bank fees.

Current issues

For a description of current Wikimedia-related issues, see Goings-on

Hardware

For a description of the hardware that powers Wikimedia, see Wikimedia servers

Random thoughts on what Wikimedia might mean

The Wiki[pm]edia family presently encompasses Wikipedia, the encyclopedia; Wiktionary, the dictionary; , the compendium of quotations; , the collection of [text]books; and Wikisource (or Project Sourceberg), the repository of primary sources (The last few are still young, and not yet internationalised).

Suggestions for something more news-oriented are fairly frequent (Wikews etc).

More multimedialike, integration of maps has been suggested (Wikipediatlas).

The world of audio and video can touch most of these and more; currently it is possible to upload media files to the wikis and link them from articles, but it's unwieldy, not very wikilike, and there's no infrastructure for streaming media beyond 'hope your media player will play as it downloads from http'.

Better yet, what's the point? It looks cool at first glance, but what would be the purpose of a vast library of freely editable media? I think it would be best to simply use media attached to articles.

However, in the Wikimedia vein, I think it would be a good idea to allow people to upload source files for images. I don't know how audio and video editing programs work - I've scarcely seen one in the face - but I do know that graphics software uses different file formats for editing and output. If I create a diagram, say, in Photoshop, I should be able to upload the .psd source file so that other people can modify it. (I've already used four such diagrams, albeit not from Photoshop, and I know they're not the greatest.) 02:22 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

On the source file note, you certainly can upload your source files to Wikipedia and link them from the image description pages. This is highly encourages for diagrams output from vector format sources. See also proposal for SVG image support, where rasterization of diagrams in SVG format could be done automatically (or a browser's native or plugin support of SVG used if available) with only the SVG needing to be uploaded. Hypothetically other formats could be similarly supported, with automatic scaling and JPEG'ing to reasonable size of photos in XCF or PSD. I don't know how desirable this is, but it could be a direction worth exploring. -- 03:02 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I uploaded with the regular utility, but there's a slight problem. The file format is unrecognized, so when I click on the file, it simply dumps the file in text characters.

How to make audio and video wikilike?

Hmm, good question.

What's the audio and video for? Is it like the regular AV media (radio, TV)? If so...maybe we could have some rudimentary online editor for audio and video. People can download clips in the appropriate format, edit them and upload them...like opening the Wikitag source, editing it, and saving as for (Meta)Wik{ipedia|tionary}. We could also let people add or delete parts of a clip directly. All edits would merge into one clip that is the "article" - one would download the part he/she wants to work on. - We'd need some way to make this accessible - an online closed-captions editor? The script of the clip as WikiText and the production on a separate page, like the Image pages? -

I suggest create a Freecode Media Player, to send and recieve internet radio broadcasting and TV using wikimedia too . It sound like FMPlayer ;)

We could officially call it the Free Media Foundation and have "Wikimedia" as a nickname & URL. -- 08:36 10 Apr 2003 (UTC)

Technical issues

CD/DVD distribution

It has been suggested that the Wikimedia foundation could distributed Wikipedia on DVDs or CDs. For the discussion, see Wikipedia on CD/DVD.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth, bandwidth, and more bandwidth! Wikipedia as it is is eating several gigabytes per day (could be reduced with compression...); extensive video and audio could increase that quite a bit.

Strange thought: what about using Freenet as a distribution channel for multimedia content? This could help protect against spikes and ; frequently requested material would get spread throughout the network and cached. Would this be practicable, or would a system of http mirrors be better?

The obvious disadvantage of freenet is that it requires users to download and install a separate package to get at stuff. (Web<->freenet gateways as distributed mirrors?)

There's also the possibility of using BitTorrent, which works as a distrbuted download manager.l

Having briefly tried out BitTorrent once, I can say it's quite easy to use from the user side. I may set up a server for the backup dumps just for kicks; on the off chance that two people download a backup at the same time, it could save a little bandwidth. ;) --

BitTorrent is a brilliant concept that has been implemented very well. Whenever I download something even remotely popular from Bittorrent I always max out my connection. With Bittorrent, the more people you have downloading the file, the more bandwidth you get, because as you download the file you upload the parts you already have to other people. Using Bittorrent is the best defense against slashdotting, and just generally cool. Freenet is a cool idea, I use it, but it's not really useful yet because it is so excruciatingly slow. -- 18:39, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

BitTorrent also is designed to work on large files; it'll help you withstand a slashdotting if you've got a big media or software download (so http connections won't free up for a long time, and your bandwidth usage goes through the roof), but it's not going to help with hundreds of thousands of individual small files, which is the general case with a site like Wikipedia. If we have more big downloads (downloadable static copies, serious multimedia) and they get more popular, it may turn out useful to use BT or similar for those. -- 23:54, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Freenet

There is one group I know of working on a collaborative creative project, based at theforce.net . What they are doing is trying to create a complete as possible sequel to the Star Wars movies, with different people doing different parts of the work, in an open-source manner. Who knows how well it will work, but Wikimedia might be able to learn from their experiences. ike9898