The Wikimedia Foundation recently announced a $890,000 grant from the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation to simplify its very techy user interface for editing posts. It’s a big chunk of change on top of a new $6 million budget for the non-profit encyclopedia, who some argue needs major restructuring rather than a simple cash infusion.
"Any amount of money thrown at it is not going to solve the problems," said Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo. "Putting up a WYSIWYG editor will cost like $50,000. It’s not that big of a deal."
Calacanis thinks (and blogged about a few years ago based on conversations with insiders) that the site's editing platform is intentionally designed to be complex so as to lower participation and thus make it easier to manage, and that if they open up the floodgates, "the site will probably come to a grinding halt." In this sense, he admits Wikimedia would need plenty of time and money to make sure the transition is done right.
"Really what they need to do is put up some ads, and then take the $50 million or $100 million they make from ads, and hire 100 really good fact checkers and editors and let them start going through and fact checking and citing stuff," he said.
But founder Jimmy Wales has made it perfectly clear that there will be no advertising on the user-generated site, which is now the 8th most visited website in North America and maintains 29 percent of total Internet audience according to a June comScore report.
"My personal view is I don’t think that’s going to be an issue at all," said Jay Walsh, head of communications for Wikimedia, on the possibility of increased spamming with a simpler editing interface. “I don’t think this makes it any easier or harder for people.”
And as an additional means of protection against abuse, he says he expects a U.S rollout (pending community approval) of a Flag Revision process in 2009 that is currently being tested in Germany.
This method puts all edit requests on specified (flagged) entries in a queue that must be approved by an editor before going live. The changes can take a day to process.
One major issue with incorporating staff edits into the site, says
Calacanis, would be a risk of Wikipedia losing its DMCA status where they would then be held responsible for any content that breaks copyright.
The Stanton grant will mostly go towards hiring new developers as well as conducting research in usability said Walsh.
“When we were putting this together, we obviously weren’t going to look at Cadillac solutions,” he said.
This is the first year Wikimedia set a fundraising goal, but it’s also the first year since its move to a new office in San Francisco as the foundation works to bulk up its staff and expand its reach across the globe.
It is looking to move from spending most of the time maintaining the site to adding new features and improving existing ones.
Developer Mike Dale is working on the MetaVid project to bring open source video to the site, and the foundation recently announced a deal with Sun Microsystems to amp up its servers to increased upload capacity to 100 MB, helping pave the way for improved multimedia.
“We’re a really, really small organization and for the work we do, it’s safe to say we do it with a pretty tiny budget, and that level of efficiency is really important to us,” said Walsh.
He says they have been in discussions with contributors for a few years about the usability and that not much has changed. But they do need to consult with those on the outside.
“The ultimate goal is to bring in a whole new audience,” he said, based on estimates that woman and older demographics are not using the site as much as young males.
They will have some real data, however, in the new year with the results of a recent survey conducted through the United Nations University which he said has had over 100,000 responses.
In addition to the usability, Walsh says they are “really curious” and have lots of interest in mobile apps that could incorporate geo-locating and possibly even allow edits from your phone.
“We talk about Wikipedia on a mobile platform a lot,” he said, noting that its future might rely heavily on the technology. “It might even be safe to say that the majority of people who will use Wikipedia will do so on a mobile device.”
