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The Outlaw Jimmy Wales: Discovering the Man Behind the Monolith That is Wikipedia

Written on
Feb 21, 2007 
Author
Kenneth Musante  |
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The Outlaw Jimmy Wales: Discovering the Man Behind the Monolith That is Wikipedia

But in 2002, something drew a line between the two Wikipedians. Sanger and Bomis parted ways. According to Wales, Sanger left the company because he didn’t approve of how open Wikipedia was. According to Sanger, he and several other recent hired were laid off by Bomis because the company was still feeling the aftermath of the bursting dot com bubble. Whatever the reason, the two former colleagues have not had any significant contact for the past five years, and the foundership of Wikipedia, which has now gained mainstream acclaim, is a point of contention between them.

From a financial and business standpoint, Jimmy Wales can certainly be considered the founder. Larry Sanger, as Wikipedia’s director and public face, was referred to as co-founder in correspondence from Wikipedia until as late as 2004, several years after Sanger had left the project.

Wales does not consider Sanger a co-founder and said so in 2006 in an interview with technology publisher IDG. In 2005 Wales was criticized for editing his own entry on Wikipedia after removing references to Larry Sanger as co-founder and to Bomis as a vendor of pornography. Editing your own Wikipedia entry is considered a major faux pas in the Wikipedia community.

Wales later apologized, saying he was merely fixing some factual errors. Other online personalities have had similar experiences. Celebrity Adam Curry, known by some as “the podfather,” was criticized for editing his Wikipedia entry while in a dispute about his role in the creation of podcasting.

Sanger is also adamant about his position as Wikipedia’s co-founder, even going so far as to publish an epic 16,354-word memoir about the history of Nupedia on the technology website Slashdot. “I don’t think it matters frankly if I was a paid employee or not,” says Sanger, “I was called ‘founder’ by everyone for the first two or three years of the project… From the question of who’s responsible for actually getting it started as opposed to bankrolling it, I’m much more responsible than Jimmy was.”

Sanger is currently working on his own online encyclopedia called Citizendium, currently being tested in private, which will be open like Wikipedia, but contain a peer review editorial process designed to prevent wiki vandalism and other inaccuracies. Citizendium will also operate under a free content license, which means that Citizendium articles can be added to Wikipedia.

Whatever his disagreements with Sanger, Wales is still committed to open reference media. In 2003 he set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit umbrella organization to manage the Wikipedia and other wiki-powered projects to increase the availability of public reference material.

His ambitions are not just limited to replacing the old cover-to-cover encyclopedia. The Foundation manages at least eight other large Wiki projects including Wiktionary, a wiki-powered multi-language dictionary, and Wikibooks, a wiki-powered collection of free content text books. His commercial project, Wikia, is also part of that vision.

“The basic idea behind the Wikia communities,” says Wales, “is to allow people to build not just the encyclopedia but the entire rest of the library now—library, magazine rack—pretty much everything that people might collaborate on.” Wikia, a wiki hosting company originally founded as Wikicities by Wales and British entrepreneur Angela Beesley in 2004, offers free wikis based around niche topics. Two of the most popular are Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha and the Star Wars wiki called Wookiepedia.

Wales doesn’t believe that community-generated media is a good fit for daily newspaper-type content. “The citizen journalism tends to be really strong at analysis and commentary, but not so strong on original reporting,” he says.

But for everything else, he believes wikis will challenge the authority of traditional reference and informational material. To that end, he’s working on a wiki-centric search engine, something that currently has no analog in the offline world, that will bring wikified information together in one place.

“I see a lot of potential for communities to come together and do things that are really deeply tied to online media,” says Wales. “Just as Wikipedia has been a big challenge to encyclopedias, I think that Wikia is going to be a big challenge to magazines.” Only time will tell if those predictions will come true, but even if they don’t, you will probably be able to read all about it on Wikipedia.





Reader Comments.

Wikipedia is a monster. This guy seems interesting. Thanks for the post

Posted by best mailing list | 2:20 pm on October 27, 2010.

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