[Foundation-l] Jimmy Wales in the news

[Domas Mituzas]

Hello,

> To be perfectly accurate:
>
> 2. Jimmy made one donation, and one donation only, to the  
> Foundation and
> that was in or around June 2003, when the Foundation was formed.It was
> approximately $2,500, deposited to open the first bank account. The  
> exact amount  is
> easy to find, since it is the first recorded donation in the books.

I'm not sure about monetary donations, and lots of the historical  
things, but someone bought quite a few servers (and donated those),  
did pay for rackspace and hosting, and paid Larry Sanger salary  
(thats where whole founder confusion comes from). Pity, I don't  
remember which credit card was used for servers in 2004 ;-)
That was slightly more than 2500$. Probably there's huge tribute to  
be paid to Tim Shell and Michael Davis too, who were part of the  
start, and did valuable contributions, even though mostly behind the  
scenes. Jimmy was there and with them. I have no idea how that Wikia/ 
Bomis thing worked at the start, but it made Wikipedia possible. And  
even though 'Wikipedia' birthday was 2001 January, there was  
considerable work being done on Nupedia, and not seeing it as part of  
project history is a failure.

Of course, it is very easy to point out that the 'donation to  
foundation' was 2500$, but the overall input was much much much more,  
both in time, in effort, and in cash. Before the WMF was rolled out,  
and after.
Now if you find the need to attack that the way you do, I'm really  
confused about your reasons.

BR,
Domas

P.S. Oh, and by the way, Jimmy did rewrite/optimize software and rack/ 
reinstall servers. He also has rights to complain about work he was  
forced to do :-)