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Comment by anindyabd | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia. Also, Wikipedia is a non-profit, and doesn't really make more money by having more people use the site. It's strange to claim that Wikipedia is being anti-competitive. Personally, I think Wikipedia Zero is a great program.

The article also says:

> The reason that the Chinese, Russian and Cuban governments fear an open Internet more than anything else is that it allows users to gather and speak to one another. But users of a walled-garden “zero-rated” Internet can’t even click links that go outside the garden.

It's true that users can't go out of the sites they have free access to. But services like Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp do allow people to "gather and speak to one another". In fact, Twitter and Facebook were prominent in the lead-up to the Arab Spring.

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> I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia.

but that's not the point, is it? what if I wanted to launch a competitor? the fact Wikipedia is non-profit shouldn't grant it some kind of super status above my business idea. non-profit doesn't automatically mean better or less evil for consumers.

> I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia.

I'm sure TVTropers resent that remark ;)

> Also, Wikipedia is a non-profit, and doesn't really make more money by having more people use the site.

Sure it does. You can't possibly tell me that you haven't noticed all the popups begging for money every year around the holidays. The more eyes on the site - and therefore the more eyes on those donation boxes - the more potential donations, and therefore the more money.

Being a non-profit doesn't mean there isn't competition involved.

I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia.

Any other encyclopedia and any wiki-formatted knowledge store could be considered close competition. Wikipedia's in the business of providing high-level (and often low) level information, and there are tons of players in that space - just perhaps not as generalized and overreaching.

Wikipedia is a non-profit. They don't really make more money by having more people use the site

Which doesn't mean that it can't compete with other entities, just that it does so under a special set of rules. It's still in the best interest of Wikipedia to keep up traffic.

> It's still in the best interest of Wikipedia to keep up traffic.

That interest is clearly not "making more money". Can you explicitly explain what those interests are? I may be naive in believing that Wikipedia's goal is "making all the world's information freely available to everyone". But if they have some other ulterior motive for expansion, I would like to know what that is.

At the very least, each of their employees' has a selfish reason to keep Wikipedia the de-facto encyclopedia. For instance, they have over $20 million in salary they need to pay every year and without traffic, they lose donations (over $45 million a year) and therefore could lose their jobs. Seems a monopoly would be in their interest.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/bf/Audit_...

The biggest competitors in a case like this you can't see, because they don't exist. It's all the competing products that were never created because the barriers to entry were too high.

> It's all the competing products that were never created because the barriers to entry were too high.

Are you claiming that they weren't created because of Wikipedia? If you do have evidence of that, then indeed Wikipedia was being anti-competitive. Otherwise, simply because no competition ever popped up, doesn't mean that it's Wikipedia's fault.

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