"I fear that authors/editors would withdraw from Wikipedia if it were
under the arm (or in the iron-fist) of a for-profit company. If these people
felt like Google was profiting on the backs of their freely-contributed content,
these content creators would leave and the Wiki would whither for lack of
fresh/updated content. Donating time so that other may profit does not seem
likely.
What is interesting is that Amazon makes this work. The company is
clearly a for-profit entity. Yet its crown jewels are the volunteer-created book
reviews. I'm not sure what makes this work. It might be that friends-of-authors
are motivated to post glowing reviews, it might be that people who disliked the
book are motivated to post scathing reviews, it might be that some reviewers
simply like to publish, or all of the above. Perhaps Wiki/Google-pedia could
borrow this model to mix free-labor with for-profit.
Looking further into
the future on an alternate path, I wonder if Googlepedia could become a fully
for-profit (or at least self-sufficient) professionally run and staffed
encyclopedia. With micro-royalties to authors/editors (and moderation-based
revocation of payments for "bad" content), the organization would attract
content creators on a for-pay basis. This aligns the motivational underpinnings
of the organization with those of the content creators. The current Wikipedia is
for-free people creating for-free content. A future Googlepedia could by for-pay
people creating for-pay content.
One overriding lesson from Wikipedia (and
Slashdot for that matter) is the ultimate necessity of sources of hard currency
for online sites. As long as something is small (and below a certain scale of
popularity) it can survive on donated hardware, bandwidth, or the benevolence of
a monied patron (someone who pays the hosting bills out-of-pocket). But once it
reaches a certain scale, the cost of serious server power, bandwidth, and
professional administrators pushes the budget far beyond the hobby scale.
Although pleas for donations can help, I suspect large-scale sites must,
ultimately, turn to ads, tie-in product sales, and subscriptions.
What is
fascinating, in a long-term trend sense, is that the cost of scale are steadily
declining. Cheaper hardware, declining bandwidth costs, and improvements in
systems management tools mean that sites can reach ever-larger scales before
generating prohibitive burn rates on costs. The number of visitors that a
hobbyist/free-site can support continues to rise. Perhaps Wike need only wait
for the singularity point when the cost to reach (and serve packets to) the
entire world is within the reach of a home-grown, volunteer-run
organization."