On 11/28/05, Justin Cormack <justin(a)specialbusservice.com> wrote:
On 29 Nov 2005, at 01:04, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 11/28/05, Anthony DiPierro
<wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
You should probably reconsider after realizing
that Wikipedia was
created by a corporation, I believe one which made most of its money
off ads, in fact.
"Bomis is a dot-com company founded in 1996. Its primary businesses
are the sale of advertising on the
Bomis.com search portal, and the
sale of erotic images over the Internet (see also Internet
pornography)."
Yep, ads and porn are why Wikipedia exists today. Throws a wrench in
that whole "corporations can do nothing but evil" theory.
Slight rewrite of history. Jimbo made his money from options trading
and set up Nupedia and Bomis at about the same time as far as I
remember (I guess I should check the Wp article). Bomis profits
may have funded Wp for a bit (and the corporations were for a while
entangled), but I wouldnt say adds and porn funded it directly -
the Spanish wp fork was about ads.
Justinc
How could you accuse me of rewriting history when you admit yourself
that you're not sure. Check the WP article. "Bomis is most notable
for creating the online encyclopedia project Nupedia, and hiring Larry
Sanger to manage it. During the early stages of this project, Sanger
began the development of Wikipedia, which was originally intended as a
sub-project and drafting platform for the more formally organized
Nupedia. However, Wikipedia, with its much lower barrier to entry,
rapidly outgrew its "parent", and soon became far larger than the main
business of Bomis itself."
You could say ads and porn didn't fund Wikipedia *directly*, because
Wikipedia itself didn't contain ads and porn. But Bomis did, and
Bomis provided pretty much the sole funding for Wikipedia in the
beginning. Wikipedia was a sub-project of Nupedia, which was a
project of Bomis.
Also, from the [[Wikipedia]] article, "Nupedia was founded on 9 March
2000 under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a Web portal company." And
"Funded by Bomis, there were initial plans to recoup its investment by
the use of advertisements."
Either the Wikipedia article(s) are wrong as well as my memory, in
which case Jimbo should speak up and clarify so we can rewrite it, or
my recollection of history is much more accurate than yours.
Anthony