Wikipedia na New Yorker: parâmetros financeiros e sociais para iniciativas colaborativas on-line

A New Yorker publicou este artigo muito bacana sobre a Wikipedia.

Há fatos vários interessantes que podem servir para balizar a avaliação dos orçamentos das iniciativas colaborativas on-line.

Um parâmetro para ver se o dinheiro investido em coisas da internet não comercial está sendo bem gasto. (Veja Overmundo.com.br: mamando nas tetas do Estado?).

A Wikipedia gera mais tráfego que a msNBC.com e as versões on-line do Times e Wall Street Journal somadas...

Wikipedia, which was launched in 2001, is now the seventeenth-most-popular site on the Internet, generating more traffic daily than MSNBC.com and the online versions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal combined.

.... possui 5 funcionários e um orçamento de U$ 750 mil, quase todo obtido através de doações de U$ 20 ou menos (sem nenhum tostão do Estado... do imposto dos contribuintes de nenhum país)

The site has achieved this prominence largely without paid staff or revenue. It has five employees in addition to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s thirty-nine-year-old founder, and it carries no advertising. In 2003, Wikipedia became a nonprofit organization; it meets most of its budget, of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, with donations, the bulk of them contributions of twenty dollars or less.

O dólar atualmente está mais ou menos em R$ 2,20... ou seja o orçamento anual da Wikipedia é de mais ou menos R$ 1,650 milhão... (Veja a nota: Orçamento do Overmundo: 2 milhões de reais!)

O artigo traz ainda detalhes interessantes sobre a administração social da wikipedia... aquela que a Revista Veja não entendeu (veja: A Veja pixou a Wikipedia e não tem vergonha disso).

At first, Wales handled the fistfights himself, but he was reluctant to ban anyone from the site. As the number of users increased, so did the editing wars and the incidence of vandalism. In October, 2001, Wales appointed a small cadre of administrators, called admins, to police the site for abuse. Admins can delete articles or protect them from further changes, block users from editing, and revert text more efficiently than can ordinary users. (There are now nearly a thousand admins on the site.)
...
Wales also appointed an arbitration committee to rule on disputes. Before a case reaches the arbitration committee, it often passes through a mediation committee. Essjay is serving a second term as chair of the mediation committee. He is also an admin, a bureaucrat, and a checkuser, which means that he is one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse. He often takes his laptop to class, so that he can be available to Wikipedians while giving a quiz, and he keeps an eye on twenty I.R.C. chat channels, where users often trade gossip about abuses they have witnessed.

Valer o artigo inteiro... tem muitos outros temas interessantes e exemplos bacanas.