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

[David Goodman]

thousands, yes. Even conservapedia has thousands. But millions?

I have no objection to working for a profit making enterprise. But
when I do, I want my share of the money.


David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 7:48 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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