Save Knowledge Save Wikipedia
Written by Ramakrishna goud on 10:20 PM
A German Publisher Bertelsmann,is planning to publish a single volume of the Wikipedia(the most popular articles ) for a cost of US $32. Now this seems to be a good business plan , but a risky plan for the publisher.After Wikipedia was launched in 2001, the major publishers of encyclopedia i.e, Britannica and others saw a plummeted sales year over year.
The book is planning to include most visited 50000 articles from wikipedia under the GNU-FDL license .
I sincerely hope that this publisher atleast donates 50% of his net proceeds to the foundation.
Also Wikipedia has been facing a lot of criticism over the authenticity of the articles. Some of the countries like China have also blocked access to wikipedia articles. Few Universities do not accept the citations of the Wikipedia articles in their students work.
Some Statistics of the Wikipedia i collected from the internet:
- 7th most visited website as per Alexa ranking as on today
- Nearly 4 million articles in 200 languages
- 4000 new articles a day
- 2 billion pageviews a month
- Traffic volumes doubling every four months
The raw statistics are also available for further research at http://dammit.lt/wikistats/
Now if this is the kind of growth for wikipedia in about 7 years, how is it going to sustain without going commercial? The community doesnot want Wikipedia to go commercial , as it might no longer be available freely and may even be available to those who can afford to pay a subscription . Currently , it is running on the various voluntary donations from all over the world. The Wikimedia foundation requires around 5 million dollars/year to sustain the website.Presently it is able to collect only 1.1 dollars/year. So how is it going to sustain, is the main worry?? So all those people who use wikipedia for their work and research, please step forward to donate before this Knowledge Bank shuts down.
| Posted in »
0 comments: Responses to “ Save Knowledge Save Wikipedia ”