Wikipedia won’t “shut within 3-4 months”

Update 2: the video of the presentation is here, check around 25:30 for the discussion transcripted below.

Update: the story ends on lunch over IP, where Bruno Giussani has a complete rundown of the situation.

I see that the rumor that wikipedia could “shut within 3-4 months” is all over the blogosphere right now (more on techmeme).

I cannot post the videos of the conference at this point, but I quickly had a look at the recording of the chat I had with Florence Devouard on the LIFT stage. Here is a transcript of the discussion, but in a word, Florence made it very clear that Wikipedia would NOT shut down in the next 3 months.

Me: “When we prepared this speech, Florence told me that Wikipedia has enough cash to pay for its server for the next…”
Florence Devouard: “Three months. Roughly.”
Me: “and if we don’t do something, Wikipedia won’t be here in three or four months. That’s a radical idea, it’s not going to happen but…”.
FD: ”…three months is a bit negative. [...] We have somebody making plans for two years in the future, I think we will survive in the next three months”.

My feeling is that Florence appears to be very confident that the foundation will get over this problem. Wikipedia is in a tensed situation but has a lot of potential solutions before they have to pull the plug. The video will follow.

Prenons les devants avant de…

C’est là où il faut se méfier de Lift. On a des surprises, de l’inattendu. ça saute en dehors des casiers. C’est une grande palabre pour nous faire prendre conscience que le numérique est déjà parmi nous et qu’il faut convaincre un monde incrédule que le cauchemar a déjà commencé comme dirait David Vincent, le héros du feuilleton « les envahisseurs ». Lift 07 nous dit « prenons les devants » avant de l’avoir par derrière…

Lien

La radio nationale Suisse parle de LIFT, et offre à l’équipe un petit moment de détente bienvenue en plein coup de stress :-)

Farewell To the Floppy Disk

…computer giant PC World has announced it will no longer carry the floppy disk once current supplies run out.

Link via Slashdot

We bought 400 floppies back in 2006, to create the lunch coupons for LIFT06. And I am still wondering what happened to the data-mining program of Office World when a decade of floppies were suddenly sold in a day at a random Geneva store.

La capsule multimédia croque LIFT07

L’année dernière , à peu près à la même époque, une bande de jeunes sortie de nulle part organisait Lift 06, une rencontre complètement louche entre les barrons du numérique. Elle réunissait à Genève les bloggeurs les plus recherchés de la planète. Et ça discutait nouveaux territoires, trafic de clicks, projets technologiques.

La suite est à écouter ici, il est vraiment très fort ce monsieur Pain.