On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 12:07 PM, Ian Woollard <[email protected]> wrote: > On 27/08/2010, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote: >> Wikipedia needs competitors. > > Realistically, the space that Wikipedia occupies seems to be a more or > less a natural monopoly. > > And Wikipedia doesn't even make money per se, so why would anyone even > want to be a competitor to it? There's no market. A market is where > people pay for stuff.
Wikipedia doesn't make money by choice. But remember there are many ways we *could* make money. For example, if we had switched to a CC-NC, there are all the licensing fees we could have charged. (And the Foundation makes money even with CC-SA - although I don't remember how much it charges Ask.com and others for the live feed of revisions.) And the most obvious way to monetize Wikipedia is advertising, and that has been estimated at millions a month (a quick Google turns up http://www.watchmojo.com/web/blog/?p=626 estimating ~50 million USD a month - in 2006). > It's not like Wikipedia is abusing its monopoly power. Is it? Depends on how you interpret the existence of Wikias like Memory Alpha or Wookieepedia. There is a case to be made that they exist only because we have abused our powers to excise their content from Wikipedia, forcing them to resort to their own sites (a very suboptimal situation). -- gwern _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
