[WikiEN-l] Lies, damned lies, and statistics

[Anthony]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 2:52 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com
> wrote:

> There are issues of fact which support a different interpretation
> than the one Jimbo appears to uphold, but in the final analysis
> it all hinges on what ones definition of the term "co-founder" is,
> and is it something formal that is inalienable; call somebody a
> co-founder once and you can't correct the record later. A favorable
> gloss on the interpretation Jimbo holds is that the early mentions
> of Mr. Sanger as a co-founder were symbolic and as a courtesy and
> as such not to be taken as a comment on his role in terms of
> historical fact.


Did Wales ever directly call Sanger a co-founder?  I don't think he did.

In any case, I don't think the question of semantics as to whether or not
Sanger is "co-founder" is interesting (though I do think a description of
Jimbo as "sole founder" cannot possibly be sustained).  What is interesting
is the role that Sanger played in the creation of Wikipedia (which I've
recently seen that Wales admitted that his role was one of direct
causation), and the role that Sanger played in the policy formation of
Wikipedia during the early years (which I'm personally not yet sure of).

Is Wales "sole founder"?  I don't think you can come up with a reasonable
definition of "founder" by which that is true.

Is Sanger a "co-founder" of Wikipedia?  I think that's harder to answer, and
I'm not even sure it's just the definition of "co-founder" that's
problematic, but the definition of "Wikipedia" as well.  Were Dave Hyatt and
Blake Ross "co-founders" of Firefox?  I'd call Sanger a "co-creator" of
Wikipedia, not a "co-founder" of it.  I suppose the term "founder" could be
used as a synonym for "creator", but for some reason I don't feel
comfortable using it that way, and I think it's the same reason I wouldn't
feel comfortable calling Hyatt and Ross "co-founders" of Firefox.  Firefox,
like Wikipedia, was a side project sponsored by a for-profit company which
eventually supplanted the main project, and a non-profit organization was
later formed to take ownership of it (sort of, in the sense that one can
"own" an open source project in the first place).