Talk:Jimmy Wales

Three quick points

1. The bit about the House of Lords is silly and should be removed. 2. The bit about Wikileaks, drawn from a highly inflammatory AFP article designed, as far as I can tell, to fuel controversy, misrepresents my position significantly. The quote from the recent article in The Independent (where the House of Lords nonsense comes from) is accurate and states my position so that the reader can understand. 3. There is much else wrong with this article, as usual. "Neither Wales nor Sanger expected very much from the Nupedia wiki initiative" is false and directly contradicts literally hundreds of statements from me over the years.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:20, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

1. I agree with the House of Lords thing and said so in my edit summary when I pared down the addition. If other editors agree, it can be removed. In my view, it's trivial. 2. I'd like to understand more about what you're complaining about with AFP. I can certainly see that the Independent's quotations of you are more measured, but are you saying that the AFP quotations are wrong or just out of context or what? 3. Perhaps you can give us some reliable sources that contradict the assertion (I assume you're not saying that the sources after the sentence don't support the assertion? I haven't read them).--Bbb23 (talk) 15:43, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Regarding the AFP, the quotations (in our article, and theirs) are highly selective and give a misleading picture of my position. The more measured version from the Independent is more accurate. Regarding the last, I doubt very much if the sources support our precise wording, but if they do, they are still wrong. You will not find those words coming out of my mouth, I'll wager, but rather out of the mouth of the writer. Here's an easy alternative, although here I am badly misquoted on the details. (I happen to know, because I have been saying exactly the same thing for a long time. :-) )--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:21, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

That allbusiness.com played havoc with my browsers (FF and IE). I think we should wait until we hear from other editors on the three points.--Bbb23 (talk) 22:04, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

1. I agree that "the bit about the House of Lords is silly", though I find it amusing too. But, formally, it's not really encyclopedic, so I'd vote to have it removed too. 2. Pass for the moment, I'd have to check further. 3. The phrasing "Neither Wales nor Sanger expected very much from the Nupedia wiki initiative" seems reasonable to me. There is much myth-making about the origins and founding of Wikipedia, that is, err, let us say at variance with the historical record. Checking the founding message from Larry Sanger, "Let's make a wiki", we find "Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not.". Certainly that's less than a resounding vote of confidence. Skimming archives, I find Sanger saying "I have to say I'm quite pleased with our progress, and the dream of actually being complementary to Nupedia seems not entirely far-fetched. Quality of articles on Wikipedia so far, in general, isn't actually that bad. There are a few original articles that are already nearly at a level where they could be Nupedia rough drafts.". Again, this seems consistent with the article's phrasing. In fact, in those very early days, ironically Sanger seemed to have been much more evangelistic about Wikipedia (versus NuPedia) than Wales! -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 23:48, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

That's what is known as synthesis (inferring what Wales expected from what other people wrote, and where the other people were not even attempting to describe a considered opinion offered by Wales). Johnuniq (talk) 00:15, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Poe, Marshall (September 2006). "The Hive". The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved 2010-12-24. Wales and Sanger created the first Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001. The initial purpose was to get the public to add entries that would then be "fed into the Nupedia process" of authorization. Most of Nupedia's expert volunteers, however, wanted nothing to do with this, so Sanger decided to launch a separate site called "Wikipedia." Neither Sanger nor Wales looked on Wikipedia as anything more than a lark. This is evident in Sanger's flip announcement of Wikipedia to the Nupedia discussion list. "Humor me," he wrote. "Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes." And, to Sanger's surprise, go they did. Within a few days, Wikipedia outstripped Nupedia in terms of quantity, if not quality, and a small community developed. In late January, Sanger created a Wikipedia discussion list (Wikipedia-L) to facilitate discussion of the project.

Sanger, Larry (April 18, 2005). "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir". SourceForge. Slashdot. Retrieved 2010-12-24. The actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on. So I arrived in San Diego in early February, 2000, to get to work. One of the first things I asked Jimmy is how free a rein I had in designing the project. What were my constraints, and in what areas was I free to exercise my own creativity? He replied, as I clearly recall, that most of the decisions should be mine; and in most respects, as a manager, Jimmy was indeed very hands-off. Nevertheless, I always did consult with him about important decisions, and moreover, I wanted his advice. Now, Jimmy was quite clear that he wanted the project to be in principle open to everyone to develop, just as open source software is (to an extent). Beyond this, however, I believe I was given a pretty free rein. So I spent the first month or so thinking very broadly about different possibilities.—Larry Sanger.

According to WP:RS, Wales was a minor editor in Wikipedia's early years and was extremely hands-off. The current text in the article is sourced in accordance with WP:V. QuackGuru (talk) 02:08, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, sometimes there's a fine line between synthesis and paraphrase. Note there's often a divergence between a) What is true b) What sources say c) What Wikipedia's rules dictate. My personal allegiance is to a) What is true - and hence, philosophically I'm on the other side of the shibboleth "Verifiability, not truth". Now, in this case, it's undisputed that the source states "Neither Sanger nor Wales looked on Wikipedia as anything more than a lark." This seems to me very close to the sentence in the article "Neither Wales nor Sanger expected very much from the Nupedia wiki initiative". If you were to advocate that the source's sentence must be copied exactly, as anything else would be synthesis or original research, I wouldn't consider that particular item worth any argument. My understanding is Jimmy Wales is claiming that though reliable sources say that, it is not true. And my reply here is - using original research only for the sake of this discussion, and not claiming the postings should be cited in the article, but solely for informational purposes in evaluation, that the statement is indeed true. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 02:17, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

EL

the current list is a little to exhanustive, can be cut down. we dont need links for the sake of it.

more importantly, should we include a link to his wikipedia page? ordinaril y not relevant, but here i think ti is.(Lihaas (talk) 04:48, 29 December 2010 (UTC)).

classification

how can this be a B? if any article should be a FA it should be this. I think with Jimbo here we can pretty much exhaust the details.(Lihaas (talk) 04:50, 29 December 2010 (UTC)).

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Jimbo's new picture in the appeal banner is way cooler than the ones before