Wikipedia Has More Than Money Troubles

http://www.lockergnome.com/greaterworld/2011/01/14/wikipedia-has-more-than-money-troubles/

Though many have been complaining of the site’s use of its founder’s picture on each page recently, and the pleas for contributions, the site has more problems than just the monetary kind.

The site’s founder refers to the nature of the site itself, saying that it is too complex or intimidating for many to be able to actively contribute.

After all, the point is that it is a community effort, and the contributions are made, and peer reviewed by those familiar with the subject matter.

Jimmy Wales has stated that the site needs many more contributors, including more women.

The news from the article meant to begin to alleviate the problem, on the BBC site, is also showing the popularity of Wikipedia – it is the world’s fifth most popular site.  Also the news of tomorrow’s date being 10 years into the project is given and that 400 million people count themselves as users of the site. Mr. Wales wishes to increase it to over a billion users by 2015. With the lack of paper encyclopedias these days, and the need for children all over the world to do research as part of their school work, that should not be difficult at all.

As the site expands, it is needing a change because the ease of use for contributors is of paramount importance – too many opportunities for information contribution are being lost.

“We have to support our old power users because they build the site,” he said. “But we also need to have a ramp for new users.”

He said a lot of people were “afraid” to contribute to the site by the sometimes complicated code – known as Wiki mark-up – needed to format entries.

“If you click edit and you see some Wiki syntax and some bizarre table structure – a lot of people are literally afraid.

“They’re good people and they don’t want to break something.

As well as initiatives such as “adopt a user”, that allows experienced Wikipedians to take a new user under their wing, he said his for-profit company Wikia had been doing a lot of work designing simple “what you see is what you get” editing tools.

“We’re releasing all of that open source and Wikipedia will probably adopt some of that.”

The site is otherwise being well served by its fund raising efforts, and the one thing that Mr. Wales has wanted to make clear is that the site is not actually affiliated with WikiLeaks, though no value judgement about that site was being offered. The domain names wikileaks, including com, net and us are owned by the parent company, Wikia, so that may have been a source of confusion for some.

It is truly amazing how many different subjects are covered in the umbrella that is Wikipedia. The current number cited that are in English is 3.4 million. Though I have seen it estimated a while ago, I have seen nothing recently giving the total size of the Wikipedia database – it would be interesting to know how many DVDs it might take to store it, and how that compares to the current size of the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica.

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