Wikipedia
I have been having fun with Ghostery– visiting all sorts of pages and finding out who is tracking what. Wikipedia doesn’t have even one tracker it seems… and there was this message (about funding, but interesting all the same):
Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 679 servers and 95 staff.
Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 450 million different people every month – with billions of page views.
Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.
When I founded Wikipedia, I could have made it into a for-profit company with advertising banners, but I decided to do something different. We’ve worked hard over the years to keep it lean and tight. We fulfill our mission, and leave waste to others.
If everyone reading this donated $10, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year. But not everyone can or will donate. And that’s fine. Each year just enough people decide to give.
This year, please consider making a donation of $10, $20, $30 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
Thanks,
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder
Julie S 11:24 am on November 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The Ghostery was a really good activity but I must say it’s freaking me out a bit. I think I’ve now gotten up to about 12 trackers on a single site. Yikes. I knew about the trackers before this exercise but I had no idea that there would be this many or that the News sites seem to be the worst. So far, the Vancouver Sun has been the single worst in terms of number of trackers.
I was so happy to see this post about Wikipedia and sure enough I went there and there are no trackers. Sweet! I will be surprised if they can keep the model up much longer. I’m not sure how long the donation model will continue to work.
kstooshnov 3:03 pm on November 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Julie,
I am still a bit in the dark with what Ghostery will be doing about the websites I’ve been visiting (since I have been floating between four different computers this week to get assignment 3 done, I’m not expecting to find out anytime soon). I suspect that it is indicating that Wikipedia is on its way out, if it still #5 on the hit list, but not a single tracker. It would be a shame to see Wikipedia have to break its own rule about ads to bump their brand up the hit list. One excellent account of how Wikipedia beat Encyclopedia Britannica (and their fledgeling website) appears in Don Tapscott and Anthony D. WIlliams’ Wikinomics. A must read for digital venturists!
Kyle
Julie S 5:26 pm on November 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thanks Kyle – I have that book 🙂 Read it a while back but I think I might read it again after this term is done. I remember it being a really good read.