Wales: Looking for ideas

Wikipedia, a non-profit website run by the Wikimedia Foundation, ranks seventh of the top 10 most popular websites in the US. It is second in popularity among the most popular social media sites in the UK. It contains over 2 million articles written by an army of volunteers.

But the site now struggles with steps for growth: Should it continue to operate on donations — which basically keep its servers running — or start monetizing the site through ads or games?

Changes come slow for an organization in which everyone has a say. The board of directors is also reportedly split on whether it should solicit partnerships among for-profit groups, according to AP Digital.
The site's new executive director, Sue Gardner, believes the future of Wikipedia lies in incremental change. The company plans to increase staff from 15 to 25 by 2010, and hold "Wikipedia Academies" in developing countries as a way to garner new entries in other languages.

Like Gardner, founder Jimmy Wales is equally unreceptive to advertising.

Wales spoke with Marc Bodnick and U2's Bono of Elevation Partners. Bono suggested Wikipedia volunteers could start articles, then have professionals polish and publish the content, equating the change to Bob Dylan going electric.

But not even free advice escapes the scrutiny of Wikipedia's vast democracy. It was allegedly easy to see why Wikipedia might be interested in partnering with Elevation — but, for board chair Florence Devouard, it remained unclear why Elevation was interested in Wikipedia.

Devouard, however, is known to entertain a kind of overblown nervousness about the condition of the company. In February 2007 she said, "Wikipedia has the financial resources to run its servers for about 3 to 4 months. If we do not find additional funding, it is not impossible that Wikipedia might disappear." The statement generated rapid backpedaling from other Wikipedia spokespeople, reports Network World.

In recent months Wales has struggled to spin the Wikipedia model off into other, more potentially profitable, platforms. He launched the Wikia Search site in beta last December. When it went live to the public in January, Wikia Search generated little more than scathing marks from critics. Traffic has nonetheless grown incrementally, according to Alexa.

"Our traffic growth is exceptional," Wales writes of Wikia in a letter to the editor. He also pointed to the success of WoWwiki.com, a World of Warcraft resource that is growing slowly but steadily.

Last week Wikipedia was critiqued for taking down its listing on agency Modernista, following the latter's attempt to create a more democratic online brand identity. Instead of navigating a website, potential clients of Modernista are now pointed to public resources all over the 'net.

Visits to Modernista.com, which pointed to Modernista's Wikipedia listing, were left to languish on an empty page just 24 hours after the siteless debut.