Jimmy Wales Discusses Wikimedia Monetization Plans

Jimmy Wales sat down this week with a group of Bloggers and analysts prior to his keynote address opening the 2008 SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas and discussed a number of topics relating to Wikimedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit charitable organization set up to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.

The Wikimedia Foundation also operates Wikimedia Commons, the repository of free images and other media and MediaWiki, the popular open source wiki software behind a huge number of corporate wikis.

I asked Mr. Wales what the Wikimedia Foundation’s plans were to increase revenue, especially now that the foundation has increased its staff.

Mr Wales said that the Wikimedia Foundation has to date relied on individual donations and volunteer efforts to achieve its mission and one of the longstanding goals of the foundation has been to increase revenue so that it can expand its mission and keep Wikipedia and the various Wikimedia projects running.

Mr. Wales mentioned that the foundation has recently hired dedicated fundraising staff and is looking at several strategies to increase revenue including:

• Working with additional philanthropic Institutions like the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to increase grants and donations to the Wikimedia Foundation
• Spending time contacting wealthy donors who the Wikimedia Foundation in the past could not engage due to the small size of the foundations staff
• Utilizing the Wikipedia brand in co-licensing deals with Mobile Carriers for example, who want to offer a quick and easy way for thier customers to access Wikipedia
• Creating Wikipedia Branded Books
• Launching Wikipedia Branded Games

Mr. Wales said that all of the ideas for raising addition revenue have to adhere to the Wikimedia Foundations values and that the Wikimedia Foundation will never considered offering advertising on its varied projects. But with a dedicated fundraising staff in place he and the Wikimedia team look forward to working through the various ideas and strategies.

1. Jeremiah Smith , September 11, 2008:

   Hopefully WikiMedia will put some of the additional funding into MediaWiki. Although MediaWiki is still a great wiki tool it is starting to fall behind tools like MindTouch and PBWiki in the case of WYSIWYG and Social Media tools

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2. Ameed Taylor , September 11, 2008:

   Jeremiah,

   I agree that MediaWiki out of the box is a bit behind some of the other wiki tools available today.

   You can customize MediaWiki to get just about any look or functionality you want but most new Wiki converts want an easy to configure WYSIWYG Wiki with built in Social Media.

   I personally like MindTouch but the one drawback to MindTouch (MediaWiki does not have this constraint) is that it requires a dedicated IP address or server while MediaWiki out of the box can run on a shared install.

   What wiki software have you settled on Jeremiah?

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3. Aaron Fulkerson , September 12, 2008:

   @Jeremiah, MindTouch is significantly more sophisticated than MediaWiki or any other “wiki” offering. Take a look at this for an explanation: http://mindtouch.com/Technology

   @Ameed, MindTouch can be installed in shared hosting environments and does not require a dedicated IP address. There are many hosts, dozens now in USA and many more abroad, that provide support for MindTouch Deki in shared hosted environment. MindTouch also offers a Deki Express SaaS offering and MindTouch Deki OnDemand.

   Finally, I should mention MindTouch will convert MediaWiki for free of charge. Ping us at questions {at} mindtouch(.)com

   Thanks for thinking to mention MindTouch gang.

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   Ameed Taylor reply on September 12th, 2008 :

   Aaron,

   Thanks for stopping by.

   That is good news that MindTouch can be installed in a shared environment. (I had read earlier about others getting MindTouch to work in a shared environment by making changes to the Apache config file but those changes may be beyond the expertise of many prospective users)

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