Where Most Needed

The Chronicle of Philanthropy provides us with a view of the Wikimedia Foundation (EIN 20-0049703  Form 990, but the 2004 Form 990EZ is not very revealing) and its initial efforts at fundraising.  (A non-subscription version of the article may be available here.)

Although the article starts out with the sensational claim that Wikipedia has a million volunteers, later in the article Wikimedia head Jim Wales identifies a core volunteer group of 3,000.  Curiously, an article in Fortune a month ago set the figure of "active volunteers" at 30,000.  According to this site, Wikipedia had slightly over a million registered users (not necessarily contributors) in March of 2006, of which 300,000 had at least one edit that had not been deleted.  However, since a change in Wikipedia's hosting, these statistics are no longer readily available. 

There's a lot of talk about the significance of Wikipedia as a new type of organization; however, the rhetoric of the Wikipedians and the nature of the content point to University campuses as the likely source of a lot of the Wikipedia content.  Wikipedia is pulling information from universities into the public domain of the Internet, sort of a reverse of Napster, where college students pulled copyrighted music into the public domain of the Internet. 

In this respect, the ultimate success or failure of Wikipedia will lie in whether Universities embrace it as it is, press for changes in the vetting process, or develop their own alternative.  To me, a mashup between Wikipedia and Facebook has a lot of potential.