QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Sun 30th January 2011, 1:34am)
If you read anything that WMF puts out, or join in their stupid forum, it's almost like Wikipedia doesn't exist. As though they are purposefully ignoring it. And perhaps they are: if they tried to manage it like any other business, they would be in for all sorts of trouble.
Oh, but sometimes, they do. They have to. Legal threats and all that.
But they just "pretend" to not have a problem.
Have a look at
this thread for the latest example.
QUOTE
On how much money Wikipedia could make from advertising, that's another subject. I would split it into three colour-coded or clearly identifiable sectors. One for straight advertising. Another for hobbyists who can collect information Pokemon stuff, train timetables or old Dr Who episodes and so on. The third for properly encyclopedic content.
You've just described Wikia, btw. (Minus the third part, although there's probably a lot of useful
encyclopedia content hidden away in there somewhere.)
Frankly, I don't think anything will change at the WMF. They are like General Electric--so hidebound,
conservative, and unable to change, that the mere idea of moving from making electrical
switchgear and turbine engines to, say, mining equipment, would cause them to laugh their heads off.
But if the market for switchgear and turbines ever collapses, they will just ride the whole massive
entity into the ground, all the while pointing fingers at each other. It almost happened to GE--read
Jack Welch's biography. GE was headed for the dustbin when Welch took the reins in 1981. He was
a bastard, but he probably saved the company from irrelevance-followed-by-bankruptcy.
(Did you know that in 1981, GE still owned the world's largest vacuum-tube factory, in Owensboro, Kentucky?
One of Welch's first acts was to sell off the white elephant--given that the market for tubes was
crashing because consumer electronics had already gone solid-state, it wasn't a bad decision.)
I don't see any Jack Welches at the WMF. Just a gang of mediocrities, blaming each other for
each disaster and crisis, and then trying to cover it all up.