My Dumb Suggestion for Wikimedia
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 12th, 2007 10:35 pmZack Exley has an ingenious solution to Wikipedia’s money problems: Ask.
If the situation is really as dire as it sounds, then why not go a little further? For one day per month, place an interstitial message over a shadowed-out home page that explains that Wikipedia relies on donations and asks people to make one. There would be a very large and visible, “Sorry, I can’t” button to let people get right to the site if they don’t donate. It would take them about 30 minutes to rig that up. And it would bring in several million dollars each day they do it (that is based on watching the speed of their past fundraising campaigns where they put a progress bar at the top). Maybe they’d only have to do it once per quarter.
When people complain to me they aren’t raising any money online, my first question is “Well, have you asked?” And usually, the answer is no, or it’s some half-hearted ask embedded deep in several paragraphs of text — kind of like what Zack says Wikipedia is doing now.
I have another suggestion for how Wikimedia can make money. Go for-profit. An unobtrusive Google adstrip embedded in each Wikipedia entry would likely grab a high CPM because each page is highly contextual. But wait, isn’t this the idea between Wikia? Well, yeah, except Wikia should be part of Wikipedia.
Right now, the Wikipedia universe is artificially limited by the community’s insistence on notoriety before a new article is created. That means an article on small fry like me gets shouted down by the community. Likewise, a series of articles detailing the finer points of Family Guy wouldn’t have a place in Wikipedia; that’s Wikia’s thing.
If knowledge is universal, and even the most random scrap of knowledge is interesting to someone, why shouldn’t it be on Wikipedia? This is the Internet. Surely you can’t argue that a page’s mere presence crowds out the pages on general interest stuff.
There is the problem of Wikipedia getting into the weeds by including esoteric tidbits on general interest subjects. That’s a problem that could be dealt with sub-pages, by including advanced reading material one can toggle on and off, sort of like an in-line footnoting system. Wikipedia could be more open to chronicling all knowledge than it currently is. And it’s not like Wikia’s model of siloed wikis has taken off or anything. People still like the original.
If they didn’t want to go the advertising route (understandable), another model could be to capitalize on Wiki content that should be walled off: internal company wikis / corporate knowledge bases, either through advertising, enterprise licenses, or consulting. Yeah, the boring, high-margin stuff…
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Tagged: wiki 
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