Re: [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  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
 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.

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Re: [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  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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[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


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