Disclosure: Webby’s World is getting paid to write this review. I will try not to let this alter our opinion.

Connecticut-based MillionDollarWiki (obviously based on the idea of the high successful Million Dollar Homepage) is a ‘wiki’ which allows members to buy an article which they then exert total control over. The idea is that members can build quality quantity which brings them extra traffic and search engine love.

A page costs $100 and it is guaranteed to stay online for 15 years (MillionDollarWiki have paid 15 years of overheads) which equals $6.67 a year!

$100 may seem steep, but John Chow, who reviewed the service here, has already made his money back from sales from his article! You also have the rights to sell your page to someone else when/if the site reaches its target of 10,000 pages and if you pay MillionDollarWiki 20% of the sale price. You can also place ads on pages; the United Kingdom article’s owner, for example, charges people £5 for a lifetime link!

Calling it a wiki is slightly false as only the page’s owner can edit it but it appears to be powered by MediaWiki. Allowing only the page’s owner to edit it prevents vandalism, of course!

MillionDollarWiki set content guidelines to prevent articles from getting ’spammy’ such as that ads can’t be excessive (in relation to the amount of content, of course), an article can’t be a pure affiliate link farm and also the first thing you see cannot be an advertisement. Also, you cannot buy ‘jibberish’ or trademarked page names.

Currently, MillionDollarWiki have sold 390 pages generating nearly US$40,000 (that’s about GB£20,000!) for themselves! This is quite amazing but as is the idea of bringing together ‘million dollar homepage’ and wikis. Some pages have had 30,000 page views so far too!

The site’s founder claims that anyone who produces quality content on the site will be guaranteed a spot on their homepage!

Get $5 off: If you use the ‘webbysworld’ promocode after you’ve selected the pages you want and you are at the checkout! I’ve spotted a few good, money making names which are still available such as ‘text links’!

The site is only two months old and I wonder how many start-ups of a similar age can boast a similar amount of revenue! It is also hopefully a way to keep folks off the Wikipedia who seem to think that the WP is a free advertisement for them! Check out Ali’s review, too.

Tags: wiki, milliondollarwiki, million dollar wiki, make money, web2.0, web2, web 2.0, web 2

1. There is no cabal! I mean what lousy website doesn’t have a cabal?
2. The Wikipedia’s like Britannica… but for Commies.
3. The Wikipedia isn’t controlled by a group of fat Westerners
4. It’s controlled by only one: Jimbo Wales!
5. Your history lecturer doesn’t like it
6. A neutral point of view is boring
7. It tries to hide the biggest cover up in human history: the librarians are hiding something!
8. It’s free (gratis). The Britannica costs infinitely more and therefore must be better!
9. Daniel Brandt doesn’t like it
10. But Daniel Brandt isn’t notable enough to have his own Wikipedia article! Oh, and he also thinks that Google and Yahoo! are evil too!
11. Who can take a Klingon encyclopaedia seriously?
12. Even the English Wikipedia isn’t in English!
13. They don’t let you violate copyright!
14. You’re not supposed to vandalise it. What’s the point in a wiki you can’t vandalise?!
15. The Star Wars article is longer than the Star Trek one (56.3KiB vs 38.4KiB!)!
16. It isn’t very secure… you can edit pages
17. Treason!
18. Wikipedians actually find this funny
19. The article for ‘42′ is for the year and not the meaning of life!
20. Since when is Tony Blair (Right) Honourable?
21. Consensus is a horrible thing! To think that more than one opinion has to be listened to! How democratic! How appalling!
22. The Wikipedia has lots of systematic bias unlike that ‘other’ wonderful encyclopaedia.
23. Since when should encyclopaedia be spelt encyclopedia?
24. The Uncyclopedia is much more factual
25. And the Encyclopedia Dramatica is much more… umm… dramatic!
26. There are no adverts. I want something to brighten up reading about the Disputation of Tortosa!
27. It keeps asking for a donation. Just like a beggar. Why doesn’t it go and get itself a job?!
28. They’re greedy with their PageRank sticking nofollow to links where credit’s due!
29. There are more atheist Wikipedians than Lutheran ones and the population of elephants has tripled in the last 10 years
30. Wikipedians dominate all the protocols: BitTorrent, email, IRC, USENET and even the HyperText Transfer Protocol!
31. The Wikipedia obviously prefers chavs to nerds, with the chav article being many kilobytes longer!
32. One word: wikiality!
33. In the fine words of Larry Groznic 2 years ago: “How can you justify a “Weird Al” biography of only a paltry 850 words?”
34. It’s a hivemind… just like the Borg. Is Jimbo Wales the Borg Queen in disguise?!
35. Jimbo’s cheating on Google
36. The co-founder defected to form another project.
37. A website’s too popular when it is mentioned in The Simpsons Comics
38. In Communist China, you don’t read the Wikipedia, it’s blocked
39. The Wikipedia is not a social network, crystal ball or anything else besides an encyclopaedia but it is quite possibly V’ger
40. The Wikipedia is the World’s largest encyclopaedia… for trivia!
41. What respected publication doesn’t use an all rights reserved copyright?!
42. That white background uses a lot of electricity!
43. The site is bigger than many countries with nearly 5,000,000 registered users on the English Wikipedia alone! Too much influence…
44. My government edits it
45. The German government pays people to edit it
46. The US government vandalise it!!!
47. The Wikipedia thinks that it is a certain Abrahamic religion.
48. Most of the 1.9 million articles are about Pokemon!
49. The Wikipedia is so arrogant that it has a page that says “I invented the Internet“!
50. I’m sorry, but who really cares about an uninhabited island in the Outer Hebrides or an islet in the middle of the Atlantic?
51. The Wikipedia says that America is the third biggest country in the World… Britannica disagrees!
52. Why do you think the article on acne is over twice the size as the article on love?
53. Not feeding the trolls is cruel!
54. Open formats are boring… I mean really who reading this actually knows how to play an OGG video?
55. The Wikipedia is one big massive multiplayer online roleplaying game… not an encyclopaedia!

(more…)

The Wikimedia Foundation are having a fundraising drive at the moment, but who are the main benefactors?

In this fundraising drive, an ‘anonymous friend’ donated $286,800 . The next largest donation is from Two Sigma Investments at $25,000 . I am extremely curious who this anonymous friend is, and for some reason I supsect it is Google or another large Internet corporation.

Google and the Wikipedia seem to have a good relationship; however they are not on the list of all-time benefactors, but Yahoo! are.

The fact nearly $1,000,000 has been donated perhaps shows how charitable today’s internet is. I’m sure, nonetheless, that most Wikipedia readers don’t donate. I haven’t made a donation as I feel that my contributions are enough.

Tags: wikipedia, wikimedia foundation, fundraising

Memory Alpha is a Wikia site which provides an in-depth Star Trek encyclopedia licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license. Currently, the site hosts 21,928 articles and 433,576 edits to the wiki.

Memory Alpha is a fairly specialised wiki, but is also fairly well used. Since 2003, it has had nearly 17,000,000 page views. By no means is Memory Alpha as popular as the Wikipedia; the Wikipedia has had nearly 0.1 billion edits made to it!

The wiki is extremely interesting to any Star Trek fan as it has lots of good and high quality biographical articles on both major and minor characters. Also, it provides high quality guides for the vast majority of episodes as well as articles on the fictional technology, planets, ships and soforth.

The site limits content to canon (although this includes TAS) materials. Star Trek novels are not included.

Memory Alpha shows the potential a wiki formed by hobbyists can form. Very few other non-WMF wikis have success anywhere close to MA’s.

MA is available in a number of other languages besides English (such as French, German & Esperanto), yet it is not available in Klingon!

Tags: web 2.0, web2, web2.0, web 2, memory alpha, star trek, wiki, wikipedia, creative commons, wikia

The English Wikipedia reached 1,500,000 articles yesterday, following 1,000,000 on 1st March 2006. This is an amazing amount of growth for less than 9 months; the encyclopaedia’s increased 50% in size!

The 1,500,000th article was about Kanab Ambersnail, which is an endangered sub-species. A bit of an obscure article, but at least the 1,500,000th article wasn’t an article created against Wikipedian policy, such as vandalism or an article about a non-notable person.

The Wikipedia is probably one of the Web 2.0’s greatest success stories and is probably the best single collection of human knowledge. However, it also has a reputation for unreliability.

I mean take this 9rules Notes thread:

The question was: What have you learned from Wikipedia? and was asked by Rafael.

The answers seemed to run along two themes.

One user said:

Not to believe everything you read on the internet.

Another said:

I love Wikipedia! I link to it’s articles a ton in my blog when I’m using a tech term that I know some people don’t know. I also use it to find answers for things that I used to use Google for. Like if I hear about dark matter, I would much rather ask Wikipedia what it means than Google.

Most people seem to have one of these two viewpoints. I believe your viewpoint is based on how much you trust others and whether you’d rather have quality over quantity. What’s yours?