[Foundation-l] Jimmy Wales in the news

[Thomas Dalton]

On 07/03/2008, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>  >> 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.

Sure, Wikipedia wouldn't do anywhere near as well if it suddenly went
all money grabbing, but it would still bring in an enormous amount of
money. Even if it failed completely within a year (which I doubt very
much), the income would probably be enough to retire on.