What Jason Calacanis doesn't understand is that if Jimbo had made Wikipedia a for-profit business, it would have failed. There would be no volunteer editors, because no one would be willing to donate their time to contribute to a project that makes money for someone else. It would have had to rely on paid editors, which would mean vastly reduced coverage (but admittedly more reliable coverage of what was there), and there would be no reason at all for it to be a wiki. And as a result, it would have been just another competitor of Britannica and Encarta, with no special distinguishing characteristic and without the brand-name recognition of those two, and it would have gone under within a few years. +Angr 06:14, 20 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
People edit Wikia, Hudong, MobyGames, Yahoo Answers, Facebook, Twitter, and other for-profit encyclopedia/service websites. Why would Wikipedia be any different? --Odie5533 (talk) 06:31, 20 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps it would have worked if, like the sites you mention, it was primarily a social networking site with a modicum of encyclopedic content thrown in to give it a veneer of respectability. +Angr 06:39, 20 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The difference is that contributing to wikipedia takes work; contributing to facebook is leisure - you don't have to provide sources for saying "i just saw a pigeon" on fb, or think about the writing style. Totnesmartin (talk) 20:32, 20 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I find it rather interesting that foregoing a chance to become one of the "50 richest men in the world" is treated with such disdain by Mr. Calacanis. I suppose if Jimbo owned 80% of Wikipedia, the other 20% would have to be owned by others. I wonder what percentage Jason would have owned, and I wonder how much money he seems to think he deserved out of it. Certainly money seems to be the only thing he's interested in. Resolute 15:06, 20 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
There was never really a choice whether Wikipedia would be non-profit or for-profit. When the idea of accepting advertising was first raised, the vast majority of the Spanish-language contributors bolted to their own project. The lesson was learned early: for all of its problems, had Wikipedia tried to go in a for-profit direction of any kinds it would have died a swift & painful death, just like countless good ideas of the Internet. (The list of Internet projects which died after someone bought them & tried to make money from them is a long & depressing one.) -- llywrch (talk) 16:26, 20 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It's true that, as mentioned above, a Wikipedia with ads would be nowhere near as successful as the free Wikipedia we have today. But I also think that Wales is a Good Person, an altruist. By making Wikipedia free he showed that he doesn't care about personal financial gain. Yet this is the charge levied against him. It is contradictory that a greedy entrepreneur would discard all hope of financial gain by taking the non-profit route. HereToHelp(talk to me) 20:03, 20 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Please see my column "Wikipedia isn't about human potential, whatever Jimmy Wales says", which examines these issues in detail. Wales is many things, but "altruist" sure isn't one of them, by his own statement and the evidence. Basically, Wikipedia was "a small side project which then became popular far beyond imagining - primarily, I believe, as a result of a quirk in Google's search ranking algorithm, a little-discussed factor." And he's been trying to (not my words!) "take the success - and, indeed, the underlying philosophy of Wikipedia, and commercialize the hell out of it" ever since. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 22:13, 20 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
