10 Comments

Wikipedia to shut down?

Despite getting an infusion of over one million dollars Wikipedia’s chair woman, Florence Devouard, has suggested that in three or four months the site will ‘disappear’.

Lets see, a site that runs no ads and handles millions of hits with no real plan on how to pay for their infrastructure – sounds like a business plan to me!

Even though the article says the quote that Florence gave was taken out of context, the site can’t remain donation based forever. Wikipedia needs rich benefactors and I see a Google acquisition in its future. It fits into Google’s business plan of acquiring and digitizing a vast majority of the worlds information.

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  • Lisa

    Somebody’s sure to take it over. Then things will change… dun dun dun

  • R031E5

    Damn it! I’m not gonna buy an encarta subscription!

  • chad

    Google should buy it…. they talk about having a wealth of knowledge… I mean thats a pretty big input… then they could harness the information in all of their applications quickly via their tweakable source code…

  • Tech^CF

    I thought lots of big organizations ran on donations alone. Red Cross and WWF does it?

  • http://adgridwork.com Nick

    Dude, the WWF isn’t donation based….they got Vince McMahon backing them ;)

  • Don Wilson

    Donations of beer that is!

  • http://www.myspace.com/AlexTheMartian Alex B

    the last 2 comments is pointless. ok, no more wrestling and beer for you two. It has not been called WWF in years lol

    Wikipedia has got to be my favorite website, although not my most visited, that would be MySpace, but definitely in the top 3.

    There is NO WAY a site as popular and with as much traffic will just “disappear”. If this quote turns out to be in correct context, then I’m sure there would be many companies offering hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to acquire it, just like what happened with MySpace and YouTube.

    And Google does seem like the best choice, since Wikipedia seems like the ‘Google of encyclopedias’.

    But if that happens, i think it might get to the point i become scared of Google and the monopoly it created, but hey, it is better part of Google’s monopoly then Microsoft’s, lol. I love Google.

  • http://blog.rbenson.info RyanB

    @Chad: I am all for Google snatching it up, but don’t they have a wiki-like app hanging out already? I thought I heard they bought out a smaller wiki product…

  • Mac Tonight

    @Alex B

    Tech meant the wildlife organisation, not the wrestling group.

  • Piriczki

    I’m hoping wikipedia shuts down permanently. Its full of fanboy biases and errors.

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