3 ms·

I skimmed the post linked at [^1], but I have a doubt about that: > Fandom is actually part of the for-profit arm of Wikipedia Are you sure about this? Since

• dcchambers 2y ago
  You're right, that's incorrect on my part. Fandom (well, Wikia) was founded and run by Jimmy Wales for a long time, but there is no official connection with the Wikipedia project/Wikimedia foundation. I will fix that.
• bawolff 2y ago
  They never had a stake at any point. The connection is that 2 of the main people involved originally (jimmy & angela) had a lot of ties to wikimedia, but they were doing wikicities/wikia/fandom as their own thing, not as part of wikimedia. Also long ago there was some minor connections. They briefly shared an office like 15 years ago i think, and they tried to jointly develop a wysiwyg editor back in like 2012 (wikimedia did most of the work i think, but wikia leant a few devs to the project at one point) which eventually became the mediawiki visual editor. Anyways totally separare orgs.
  • dcchambers 2y ago
    To be fair I think you could argue we're actively witnessing a cautionary tale about one founder having large interests in both a nonprofit and a related for-profit company with the ongoing Wordpress.org/Automattic/WPEngine drama.
    • bawolff 2y ago
      Oh definitely. Its definitely a bad coi for soneone to control both. The other side of this is that jimmy does not have very much control over Wikimedia foundation now a days either. He still has a board seat, but its just one seat among many and the board is pretty hands-off.