Richard Holton wrote:
My conclusion? "Jimbo Wales had a vision for a free online encyclopedia;
he and his
employee Larry Sanger worked up Nupedia as a first stab at this vision; after hearing about wikis - which Jimbo had also recently discussed with another employee, Jeremy Rosenfeld - Larry laid down the first strokes of what would become Wikipedia."
Sorry this has turned into such a ramble, but I hope it is of some value to someone. --
Thanks, Rowan. I found this very helpful.
Yes, it sounds very reasonable--for someone who wasn't there. Unfortunately, it is still very misleading.
Since I was there and I know precisely how it started, apparently unlike *ANYBODY* writing about this subject here, let me rewrite your conclusion:
"Jimbo Wales had a vision for a free online encyclopedia; he hired Larry Sanger to be the project's editor-in-chief, and he, with a voluntary advisory board, worked up Nupedia as a first stab at this vision. There were problems with Nupedia's system, which Larry was tasked to solve. Larry heard about wikis one evening over dinner and the very next day, or the day after, as a direct and sole result, laid down the first strokes of what would become Wikipedia. Jimmy said later, in 2005, as an interesting bit of historical trivia, that someone else first suggested a wiki encyclopedia to him. This suggestion, however, had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the origination of Wikipedia, nor did Jimmy mean to suggest that it did."
That would not be misleading. I mean, of course Jimmy did not mean to suggest that Jeremy Rosenfeld's saying anything to him actually *led to* the creation of Wikipedia, did he? I'm not sure Jimmy has been perfectly clear about this point.
What some people seem to want to be true is this: "Jeremy Rosenfeld got the idea for Wikipedia, which he conveyed to Jimmy. Jimmy then told Larry to start it, which he did." That is completely false. No:
"Larry got the idea; Larry asked Jimmy to set up the wiki software on the server, which he (or Jason Richey) did; then Larry got to work."
I noticed that someone has put the following words into my mouth on my user page,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger
"My name is Larry Sanger. I was Jimbo Wales' employee when Jeremy Rosenfeld had the idea to start the encyclopedia, and the first (and so far only) editor-in-chief of Nupedia."
I am not going to get into an edit war with some person who knows nothing about what he is trying to make me say. Will someone please revert the page? Thanks in advance.
--Larry (unsubscribing now, hopefully)