[Foundation-l] What Wikipedia owes to Jimbo (was Re: Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions)

[Tim Starling]

On 10/05/10 20:51, Delirium wrote:
> That isn't really true, though. He recruited volunteers with the promise 
> of the free-content license for sure, and with a sort of implicit 
> promise of a generally free-culture / volunteer-run encyclopedia. If he 
> had *not* promised anything, he would have had many more troubles 
> recruiting volunteers. 

Perhaps, but the lack of a free license didn't stop IMDB or Yahoo
Answers, did it?

> You do remember that GNUpedia was gearing up to 
> serve as a competitor, and only backed down because Jimmy gave them 
> enough assurances that Wikipedia was such a free-culture encyclopedia 
> that their efforts would be redundant?

No, I remember that GNUpedia was a tiny non-wiki encyclopedia project,
I don't remember it gearing up to be a competitor.

But I'll admit that the content license was the most essential to
Wikipedia's success of the three elements I'm talking about. I think
the case is much stronger that it could have succeeded with a
for-profit stance, and with a closed-source software stack.

Even the bulk of the open-source community doesn't mind contributing
to websites that run on a closed-source stack, look at Sourceforge or
GitHub. And for-profit organisations which commercialise
community-developed open-source projects have become the norm.

> In short, Jimmy could not have gone the for-profit or non-free-culture 
> route, because he would have been left more pitiful than Citizendium: a 
> project with no contributors.

Wikipedia collected thousands of articles while it had an FAQ that read:

"Q. Why is wikipedia.org redirected to wikipedia.com and not the other
way around?"

"A. I'm afraid it's for precisely the reason you fear: the people who
are organizing this view it partly, from their point of view, as a
business. They hope to recoup their costs, at the very least (certain
Wikipedia members are actually paid to help!)--by placing unobtrusive
ads, someday in the possibly-distant future. It would, thus, be
dishonest of them to use .org. Of course, if you don't like this, it
will be possible to export all the contents of Wikipedia for use
elsewhere, since the contents of Wikipedia are covered by the GNU Free
Documentation License."

It's complete nonsense to claim that with a for-profit stance,
Wikipedia would have been "more pitiful than Citizendium". It was
bigger than Citizendium while it *had* a for-profit stance.

Of course some contributors would have left, that's partly my point.
The policies Jimmy imposed on Wikipedia caused an accumulation of
like-minded people, and that's why Wikipedia's culture today is what
it is.

-- Tim Starling