Caution: this is an editorial in which I express personal opinions beyond the scope of Wikipedia, and most certainly not in NPOV. :-)

--- I feel compelled to point out that I in no way agree with the thesis of the AP article, and feel that this is a prime example of how biased journalists pursue their agendas.

You'll notice that there are no quotes from me in the article -- the reason is that the reporter asked me a series of leading questions, trying to get me to bash commercialization on the Internet, or to support public spending on content, and I refused to take the bait.

To detect the bias, notice how he compares Wikipedia's *contributors* to AOL/Time-Warner's *visitors*. Comparing our *visitors* to their *visitors* would have been compelling enough -- they're big and we're small, no shock there. Is there any reason, though, to think that a single project (an encyclopedia) will have traffic that is similar in any way to a vast conglomerate? Clearly, the answer is NO, so what's the point of the comparison?

A better comparison, but not helpful to him in grinding his axe, would be between traffic to AOL/Time-Warner's "broadcast" pages versus their "community" pages. What he would find is that AOL/Time-Warner's traffic is primarily a function of their providing a space for free, non-commercial community activity... paid for with commercials! This is only a paradox to people too anti-capitalist to think in anything other than a complete intellectual fog.

Another good comparison would be between the traffic of Wikipedia and the traffic of Britannica -- I do not have recent numbers, but a couple of summers ago, Britannica reported 30 million pageviews in a month -- whereas Wikipedia is currently at around 1.5 million a month. I'm sure they are higher than 30 million now, but call it 50 million or 100 million -- we're still coming on strong, and growing 30% a month or more.

I disagree entirely with the thesis that there is a lack of "nonprofit" or "community" activity on the net. I disagree entirely with the notion that a few big corporations are in a position to control the content of the net. But I most MOST strongly disagree with the idea that anyone who is unhappy with the state of the Internet has the right to use *force* (i.e. money stolen by the government) to pursue their agenda. There's no more effective way to ensure the death of true grassroots activity than to set up tax-funded competition for it.

This guy reminds me of the anti-globalization pinheads who think that any form of commercialism is necessarily corrupt.

The best thing I can say for this article is that at least he spelled my name correctly, and I can only most sincerely hope that we are not inundated with goofballs who agree with him, and who want to turn wikipedia into some kind of anti-freedom editorial statement.

--Jimbo