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Another indicator that we live in a f***ed up world

The wikipedia has a operating budget of about $1.2 million a year – and they currently are reporting a $160k shortfall.

The corperation for public broadcasting is whining because they have had their budget cut from $400 million to $300 million.

Okay, I love PBS, but…

For blank’s sake.. $300 million dollars in government funding, plus all of the private and corperate funding.. and, if you all haven’t noticed, PBS basically runs ads just like any other broadcast system, they just call them ‘thanking our sponsers’.. well, okay, if you all want to kid yourselves like that..

The wikipedia! has! no! ads!. It offers information which may be biased or incorrect, but at least has a better chance of maybe bearing some resemblence to the truth than any other encyclopedia compiled to date. And they’ve got a budget shortfall, when their total budget is probably less than PBS spends on their fancy window offices.

Why can’t the U.s. government just kick a couple of million dollars over to the wikipedia people? Kind of, you know, eliminate any worry that they might not be able to keep the lights on next year?

Actually, it occurs to me that a mostly unbiased forum for collecting knowledge might be considered a bad thing by the current administration. Maybe even a very bad thing.

But I’m going to try and put on my optimism hat and hope everything comes out for the best.

In the meantime, I’m donating everything I would have put into politics this month into the wikipedia instead. Probably do more good there.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 3rd, 2006 at 9:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Another indicator that we live in a f***ed up world”

  1. goamaki Says:
    September 4th, 2006 at 10:11 pm

    well, not everyone has the internet and access to wiki. :/ PBS has to run ads, because maybe the internet is taking away people’s interest…I dunno.
    Interesting…

  2. anonymous Says:
    September 13th, 2006 at 2:16 pm

    Yep. I donated this year. Been thinking about doing so again.

    -Cygz

  3. rarkrarkrark Says:
    September 17th, 2006 at 1:52 pm

    It’s an unfair comparison. It costs a whole heck of a lot more to produce a TV show than to write an article, more to run many broadcast studios than to run many servers and I suspect that more of wikipedia’s labor is volunteer.

    PBS runs fewer ads than other networks. The difference is particularly noticeable amoung children’s programming.

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