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

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 2:31 AM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I imagine Wikia has millions of articles, all told.  Gaia Online
<http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/> has more than 1.7 *billion* posts.
Facebook and YouTube both get user-contributed content on comparable
or greater scales than Wikipedia.  Sure, they have lower quality
standards and you have to scale down the quantity accordingly for a
fair comparison, but that doesn't defeat the point.  All are run by
for-profit corporations, and nobody cares.  They contribute for their
own reasons, and view the ads as a necessary burden.

Open-source software is another good comparison.  Many of the biggest
projects are controlled by businesses, which profit off them
extensively.  But nobody minds, not even Richard Stallman.  People are
just as happy to be Ubuntu or Fedora maintainers as Debian
maintainers.  They don't ask for a cut of the money, because they know
the business is reinvesting the profit in the project itself.

Basically, all of Web 2.0 is built on user contributions, but
Wikipedia is the *only* major not-for-profit site out there.  Every
other very large site is for-profit.  This suggests Wikipedia's
not-for-profit status is a fluke, not an inevitability.  People
participate in these sites mainly for fun, status, or personal gain,
not high-minded idealism.  The number of Wikipedians who have
convinced themselves otherwise only demonstrates how eager people are
to believe in their own nobility.