Reached the venue Tidel Park at around 9:30 AM and was good to see so many techie guys around in one room.There was Jimmy Wales,the founder of the Wikipedia talking about WiKi and its journey.Some of the interesting during this entire session with Jimmy Wales which lasted around 1.5 Hours is below:
The question is what the traditional search engine companies take some good stuff from the Wiki?.As per Jimmy,this is not a potential danger.Security through obscurity is a bad idea!!Hence,there is no danger in making the search open to the entire world.During the course of the same question,Jimmy revealed some facts of the Wikipedia foundation:
1. 10% of the money goes to the growth of the WikiMedia foundation.
2. There are only 31 employees working full time for Wikipedia.
b. What about the funding model of WikiPedia?
Donations come from the general public and this is where the major funding comes for Wikipedia and money comes from all over the world.There was recently a false news that the WikiPedia foundation had a fund problem and this is where Jimmy completely denied the news.
c. So where does Wikipedia get the revenues from?
The entire revenue comes from advertising and it is only through Google Ads
d. Why do you so less on your wordpress blog?
Jimmy Wales blogs here. Jimmy is very much afraid of the press and said that “What if he misses a comma in a sentence,than he has to wait 2-3 days with the press”
e. Business Model in the Open Source World:
Firefox is an excellent example of an open source browser.It gets around 100m$ every year.Also,I(Himanshu) was surprised to know that “Every Google search in the Firefox leads to some amount of donation to the FireFox(Mozilla Foundation)
f. How about donating of computer resources to the Wikipedia foundation?
1. Latency problems may arise in case of Peer to Peer networks.
2. User privacy would be a problem.For Wiki Foundation,the bandwidth would cost around 25000$/month.Jimmy found very difficult to reveal that “There is a major internet company in the US that has already offered to host Wikipedia for free but the Wikipedia foundation has not accepted the offer.
g. What about using Wikipedia as a source of delieverables in our day to day business?
The hierarchy business is all nonsense.I don’t believe in it.Instead,grass roots communication can help a company grow better.BestBuy is an excellent retailer in the US.It is a company that follows the grass roots communications rule.In BestBuy,some guys install stereos since it is their job and some install them since they are all stereo geeks. 
A neat abstract.
On the revenew model he talked about his opinion about wiki firm stand about Ads on their own and using those revenues for community development was quite interesting.
On the open source success model he made few points abt success/unsuccess of desktop utilities.
http://suryan.fm
Yeah Good review, felt sorry that i couldn’t able to make it this time.
Have nice time there 🙂
-Alok
Himanshu,
good of you to summarize the Q & A.
perhaps you would like to look at a more elaborate coverage of the session (including the talk of Jim) in my blog post
Jimmy’s Q&A
Hi Saran,
Thanks so much for the updates.Would definitely update this post with your comments!!!
-Himanshu
Hey Alok,
Yes you missed a chance to meet many interesting people and listen to one of the most interesting guys-Jimmy Wales 😉
But yes,Bar Camp 3 is back..We can catch up there!!!
-Himanshu
Hey Badri,
You have really noted down each and everything whatever Jimmy Wales told.
Nice summarization I say!!!
Have left a comment on your blog.
-Himanshu