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In interviews with Jimmy Wales, he seems somewhat regretful of not having made Wikipedia a for-profit. At the least, he's fairly adamant that Wikipedia could ha

In interviews with Jimmy Wales, he seems somewhat regretful of not having made Wikipedia a for-profit. At the least, he's fairly adamant that Wikipedia could have been Wikipedia as a for profit. The way he structured wikipedia, from back-end infrastructure to ownership/governance structure was just the logical way of doing the project. Times were different. Online culture was different. I don't want to overinterpret the man, or put words in his mouth... but... I got the impression that Wales thinks that if he was starting Wikipedia now, he'd just do it asd a startup and also succeed. To me, this is almost sad. Besides being an awesome encyclopedia, wikipedia is existence proof for something of scale outside the norm. Something that isn't a corporation. A lot of things are deterministic to the structure of an organization. For example, take the current postpostmodern war over truth and stuff: platforming/deplatforming, freedom of speech, censorship, bias, manipulation, narrative = power issues, etc. Wikipedia is at the very centre all these problems. Whatever difficulties Twitter is experiencing should be 100X worse for wikipedia. Meanwhile, Wikipedia is withstanding far better, and with far more integrity. I don't think this is a coincidence. Dunking on wikipedia's budget/spending is popular. Meanwhile, Wikipedia uses <1% of the resources/budget of Twitter. They are operating @ >100X efficiency compared to a realistic for-profit equivalent. That's a flying shuttle. We know that Wikipedia, Linux & The Worldwide Web are possible because they exist. We literally wouldn't know otherwise. Theory couldn't have gotten us to this knowledge. Each is existence proof for other ways of doing things. They aren't necessarily roadmaps, but I'm a big believer in existence proofs. What Jimmy made is 100X better, more important and non-inevtiable than what Zuck made. The thought that he wants to be Zuck bums me out.

nolok 6y ago
It would succeed the same way Quora does. Much less open, much less universal, much more user hostile, with an almost agressive way to deal with unlogged user. In terms of financial and organisational success it would probably largely beat what it is now. It terms of benefit to humanity, it would be much worse. Company + for profit + laws means access to information has to be much more tailored to the laws of each place. "Let's remove tianamen's article or lose your chinese license" kind of things. I'm for one am glad for the current wikipedia we have, despite it's numerous flaws. I still donate every year, although I wish Wales could stop having it spend its money the same a startup or FAANG does.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  Quora imo is a horrible website and I rarely find actually good advice on it. At this point I actively avoid clicking on it's links because of how aggressive they are towards non logged users.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  That's one option, though I wouldn't necessarily use Quora as a mainline example. They're kind of a $gme for rich people. I think highly enough of Jimmy to bet on him doing a much better job than that. Stackoverflow is a decent example. Very capable founding team. They explicitly tried to be like a commercial wikimedia. They do embrace quite a lot of openness, notably creative commons... learning from wikimedia successes. RE "I wish Wales would:" Another consequence for how wikipedia is structured is that Wales isn't the Zuckerberg of Wikimedia. Power is a lot more dispersed. RE spending/flaws and such: I feel like wikimedia is held to an extremely unfair standard. Who/what should we compare them to? Wikimedia spend $70m per year. This is probably less than Quora or stackexchange. FB & Twitter (IMO more comparable in terms of scale/importance) spend $55bn & $3bn. Twitter spends 45X more than Wikimedia. Facebook spends almost 1,000X compared to Wikimedia. The bang-for-buck is insane. Also in terms of flaws in rules/judgement calls. A lot of people are highly critical of wikipedia's "deletionism" related MOs. What articles/edits stay in. How good the rules & procedures are for this. What "camp" has power, and how they treat the other camp. I get that this stuff is contentious. Meanwhile on Twitter or Facebook, the rule is "I decide." "But it gets us clicks" is the killer argument. Nothing is transparent. Wikimedia is doing a much better job, respecting user & editor rights far more, being a lot less self righteous. Of course it's not perfect, but come on. The "norm" is Facebook's content policy, Twitter's safety department, or Apple's App store approval room. Wikimedia is the one example of being better than that... and for that everyone is always yelling at them.
Vinnl 6y ago
I can also imagine that he'd say that just because it makes him look/feel better, i.e. it's more of a sacrifice if he gave it for free while he also could've been a billionaire, than if this was the only way Wikipedia could ever have been a success. Then again, WikiTribune was a for-profit.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
Yeah, the Web was quite impressive (though we already had the Minitel), but it was Wikipedia that really blew my mind (even though we already had Encarta). (In fact I consider Wikipedia to be the Web's "killer app", even more than Google and other search engines were.)
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Out of all the "killer apps" for the web... wikipedia is the one that implement the www most faithfully. Hypertext articles. Most apps got the web to do x. Wikipedia is what it was made to do.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Yeah. I was about to add that it pretty much has been Tim Berners-Lees vision coming to fruition, but the fact that Wikipedia is centralized has stopped me. But then isn't the Web itself technically 'centralized' on the Internet ? And isn't Wikipedia a great example of pseudonymous strangers (= social decentralization) collaborating with each other ?
    - dalbasal 6y ago
      Is it really that centralized? Citations and footnote links are a pretty important part of what wikipedia is. I mean, I very rarely click through to see source material, but when I do it's noticeable how much more powerful wikipedia is than a standard encyclopedia.

nolok 6y ago

It would succeed the same way Quora does. Much less open, much less universal, much more user hostile, with an almost agressive way to deal with unlogged user. In terms of financial and organisational success it would probably largely beat what it is now. It terms of benefit to humanity, it would be much worse. Company + for profit + laws means access to information has to be much more tailored to the laws of each place. "Let's remove tianamen's article or lose your chinese license" kind of things. I'm for one am glad for the current wikipedia we have, despite it's numerous flaws. I still donate every year, although I wish Wales could stop having it spend its money the same a startup or FAANG does.

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
Quora imo is a horrible website and I rarely find actually good advice on it. At this point I actively avoid clicking on it's links because of how aggressive they are towards non logged users.
dalbasal 6y ago
That's one option, though I wouldn't necessarily use Quora as a mainline example. They're kind of a $gme for rich people. I think highly enough of Jimmy to bet on him doing a much better job than that. Stackoverflow is a decent example. Very capable founding team. They explicitly tried to be like a commercial wikimedia. They do embrace quite a lot of openness, notably creative commons... learning from wikimedia successes. RE "I wish Wales would:" Another consequence for how wikipedia is structured is that Wales isn't the Zuckerberg of Wikimedia. Power is a lot more dispersed. RE spending/flaws and such: I feel like wikimedia is held to an extremely unfair standard. Who/what should we compare them to? Wikimedia spend $70m per year. This is probably less than Quora or stackexchange. FB & Twitter (IMO more comparable in terms of scale/importance) spend $55bn & $3bn. Twitter spends 45X more than Wikimedia. Facebook spends almost 1,000X compared to Wikimedia. The bang-for-buck is insane. Also in terms of flaws in rules/judgement calls. A lot of people are highly critical of wikipedia's "deletionism" related MOs. What articles/edits stay in. How good the rules & procedures are for this. What "camp" has power, and how they treat the other camp. I get that this stuff is contentious. Meanwhile on Twitter or Facebook, the rule is "I decide." "But it gets us clicks" is the killer argument. Nothing is transparent. Wikimedia is doing a much better job, respecting user & editor rights far more, being a lot less self righteous. Of course it's not perfect, but come on. The "norm" is Facebook's content policy, Twitter's safety department, or Apple's App store approval room. Wikimedia is the one example of being better than that... and for that everyone is always yelling at them.

Vinnl 6y ago

I can also imagine that he'd say that just because it makes him look/feel better, i.e. it's more of a sacrifice if he gave it for free while he also could've been a billionaire, than if this was the only way Wikipedia could ever have been a success. Then again, WikiTribune was a for-profit.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

Yeah, the Web was quite impressive (though we already had the Minitel), but it was Wikipedia that really blew my mind (even though we already had Encarta). (In fact I consider Wikipedia to be the Web's "killer app", even more than Google and other search engines were.)

dalbasal 6y ago
Out of all the "killer apps" for the web... wikipedia is the one that implement the www most faithfully. Hypertext articles. Most apps got the web to do x. Wikipedia is what it was made to do.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Yeah. I was about to add that it pretty much has been Tim Berners-Lees vision coming to fruition, but the fact that Wikipedia is centralized has stopped me. But then isn't the Web itself technically 'centralized' on the Internet ? And isn't Wikipedia a great example of pseudonymous strangers (= social decentralization) collaborating with each other ?
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    Is it really that centralized? Citations and footnote links are a pretty important part of what wikipedia is. I mean, I very rarely click through to see source material, but when I do it's noticeable how much more powerful wikipedia is than a standard encyclopedia.