The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, recently sent a message to the Wikipedia mailing list asking what people would recommend the WikiMedia foundation attempt to buy if they had $100 million dollars for that purpose?
I would suspect that there’s a fair level of seriousness to the offer (from whichever dot.com billionaire it may be who is offering it) as this isn’t the type of thing you would go public with if it wasn’t a strong possibility.
WikiMedia denizens created a page to record suggestions and the ideas range from “buying rights to a complete set of standard undergrad textbooks” to “build a fully open source directoy of photos of major 20th century figures” to purchasing and releasing various government and non-government documents that aren’t already in the public domain.
My idea? I think there would be a certain poetic justice if they bought Encyclopedia Britannica, put the current version up as a “locked” starting point then allowed people to build forks from that. Of course, if that isn’t possible, there is a version of Britannica, that is available to them right now.
(via BoingBoing)
- JH