At 15:16 23/10/2013, you wrote:
Sad. ===============
Yes, it is. But I've suspected that this might happen. In a curious way, it interleaves with one of my businesses, Handlo Music
Soon after Sally invited me to join FW, one existing member happened to state (very confidently) that the Internet would not become a business medium. Because his equally confident statements about other matters got up my nose, I decided to try.
I settled on publishing music scores for choirs. Because I had little capital I learned how to notate music from the keyboard and notated abut 40 scores to start me off. I actually got started before Amazon existed. I charged moderate fee to download a copy and gave permission to the purchasor to make as many copies from it as his or her choir needed. In time, we were selling to choirs all over the world, and I was able to employ some notators in Russia.
A few months after I started some others were stimulted to do the same, except in their case (The Choral Public Domain Library) theri scores were free to download! Further, anybody who wished could annotate muisc and send to CPDL. I was annoyed because it stopped our rate of growth in its track -- and we were about to expand into orchestral scores! But we kept going because I noticed that the quality of CPDL's scores was often very poor, whereas I had insisted that Handlo's quality should be equal to the quality of the best German publisher of music, Barenreiter. In time, I considered that we would win out. Besides, because CPDL was growing so rapidly, it was requiring huge admin, memory and server support and I wondered whether it could keep going.
In due course, CPDL couldn't cope and sought the help of Wikipedia who took on their growing costs. And now, Wikipedia is in trouble! And for the same reason as CPDL!
Wikipedia needs a hugh amount of investment. It needs to charge a fee. I use Wikipedia a great deal. Some of the contributions are suberb, but others are not so good. I would be happy to pay a modest fee.
But if Wikipedia (and CPDL with it) fails, Handlo still earns a nice little monthly fee and will continue fror as long as choirs are singing.
Keith
Subject: [ PFIR ] MIT Tech Review: The Decline of Wikipedia MIT Tech Review: The Decline of Wikipedia http://j.mp/1a6l6UL (MIT) "Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to "compile the sum of all human knowledge" are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project's flagship, the English-language Wikipedia-and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation-has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project's own. Among the significant problems that aren't getting resolved is the site's skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project's own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don't earn even Wikipedia's own middle-ranking quality scores. The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage." - - - --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein (lau...@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com _______________________________________________ pfir mailing list http://lists.pfir.org/mailman/listinfo/pfir _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@lists.uwaterloo.ca https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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