[Foundation-l] Jimmy Wales in the news

Marc Riddell michaeldavid86 at comcast.net
Fri Mar 7 13:24:08 UTC 2008


>> on 3/7/08 1:36 AM, SlimVirgin at slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:
>> 
>>> There are also the hundreds of unpaid man hours Jimbo has put into the
>>> project. Not to mention that if he'd retained ownership of Wikipedia,
>>> he might now be worth an absolute fortune.

On 07/03/2008, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 
>> How would "owning Wikipedia" increase someone's fortune, Sarah?

on 3/7/08 8:10 AM, Andrew Gray at shimgray at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> If you owned Wikipedia - whatever that nebulous term might mean - I am
> quite, quite sure you could sell that 'ownership' to some sucker for
> quite a lot of money tomorrow just by waving around the name.
> 
> More seriously, direct ownership is control, and implies you get any
> incoming funds. It's effectively the capacity to monetise the site at
> will, to say "as of tomorrow, there's ads". That's quite a valuable
> potential, even if you don't decide to exercise it.
> 
> I believe someone on this list has done a worst-case
> back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much could be made if it was
> decided to "strip-mine" Wikipedia for fiscal gain - if you implemented
> advertising and so on without any particular concern for pissing off
> the community, or for sustaining goodwill in the long term. Quite what
> order of magnitude you might make off it is debatable, but it'd
> certainly be comfortable!

Thanks for this, Andrew, I never looked at it that way before. Wikipedia as
a for-profit enterprise would certainly give someone pause when thinking
about volunteering to work on it.

Marc





More information about the foundation-l mailing list