from Hacker News

Tell HN: The solution to Wikipedia's funding

by hakaaak on 11/30/12, 2:34 AM with 1 comments

So I keep noticing that wikipedia keeps changing their pleas for funding on their site. While not quite as annoying as public radio interrupting their programming with boring people asking for money with ringing phones in the background that I never give to, I'm starting to wonder why Wikipedia is free if they need money (and the same goes for public radio). Unlike many of you, I grew up with encyclopedias. Real encyclopedias, not some encyclopedia on a disk or CD. They were huge and intimidating books of knowledge. When I read them, I felt like I was holding the last bastion of knowledge- that I had something substantial. Parents appreciated this and would shell out the money for them. Today, we have an incredible amount of information in Wikipedia and rely on it during the year without giving it a second thought. Why aren't we paying for it? I pay for Pandora and appreciate it. I would pay for Wikipedia, but for some reason non-profits think they they are doing a greater service to us by being free. But, libraries could buy subscriptions to Wikipedia and still provide those services for free. The only way to get people to pay for it is for them to give everyone a deadline for donations, then shut it down, and then startup a for-profit with the same information.

  • by pedalpete on 11/30/12, 2:51 AM

    I think you're not understanding what their goal was/is. Not everything is a business. Not everything is paid for. As I recall, the last time wikipedia did a request for funding, they were very happy with the results. It's a charity asking for funding. Not everybody has to pay. Not everybody can pay, but even those who can't pay benefit for free.

    "shut it down, and then startup a for-profit with the same information", is completely wrong, as the people who created the content did it for the purpose of providing it for free to the world as a resource. That is the value. They would likely loose the submissions and quality if they did this. Though it has been done before. Gracenote CDDB was open sourced, then they closed it and left the open source version unapdated which was the instigator for MusicBrainz to create an alternative.