On 11/28/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
On 29 Nov 2005, at 01:04, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 11/28/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@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