Includipedia Blog

The Encyclopedia of Life is is an open content web repository of information on all 1.8 million catalogued species. They also have a blog.

(via Memex 1.1)

I’ve recently added a new video file to Includipedia’s download area. The video is a walkthrough of building the MultiMachine. MutliMachine is an open source machine tool, that can be built inexpensively by a semi-skilled mechanic with common hand tools, from discarded car and truck parts, using only commonly available hand tools and no electricity. Eventually they plan to design and build a CNC version.

You can get the video from the MultiMachine page, either as an http download or via BitTorrent.

Timothy Schmidt, who’s involved with both the MultiMachine and RepRap project, provided me with the video. He has also announced it on the RepRap builders blog.

A story has hit the news concerning Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ relationship with “controversial Canadian TV pundit Rachel Marsden”. I’m not going to talk about that, because frankly I’m not interested in Wales’ sex life. But one thing that did interest me is the allegation that he spent Wikimedia’s money on himself. (Wikipedia is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a charity that gets its money from donations). According to Wired:

Former Wikimedia exec Danny Wool, who left the foundation last year, wrote a blog post insinuating that Wales used the nonprofit foundation as his own personal piggy bank. Expenses that Wales tried to apply to the foundation included $300+ bottles of wine and visits to Moscow massage parlors, Wool alleges. According to Wool, the expenses got so out of hand that the Wikimedia Foundation took away Wales’ corporate credit card.

Since the Wikimedia Foundation is a charity, it’s obviously relevant how it spends its money. Includipedia, on the other hand, is a for-profit organisation which aims to fund itself by advertising, and if I want to spend £150 on a bottle of wine (I don’t, incidently), that’s no-one’s business but mine.

But although Includipedia is for profit, it’s not just for profit. We have other goals, too: we want to encourage open content, including free software/open source. So we’ll be developing software for MediaWiki and other projects, and giving it back to the community under open source licences. One project we’re particularly interested in is OpenStreetMap, because non-free alternatives such as Google Maps restrict what you can do with the data.

Our long-term goal is to bring all the world’s information to all the world’s people. This has implications. For example, some people cannot afford an Internet connection. It may be that mesh networking will help to solve that problem; if so we can develop or fund suitable mesh networking software.

Another way to help people afford an Internet connection (and other things) is to help them be richer. Perhaps Includipedia could do a tie-in with organisations such as Kiva to allow the businesses they fund to have micro-wikis on the Includipedia site.