Sanger controversy reignited, Limbaugh libeled, and more

The longstanding debate over Larry Sanger's role in the foundation of Wikipedia (covered in Signpost issues April 13, 2009, May 11, 2009, August 7, 2006 and April 2, 2007) was reignited recently when Internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and Sanger alleged that Jimbo Wales has downplayed Sanger's role on Wikipedia for financial motives, according to this report.

The controversy began with Calacanis stating in an interview on the Internet Evolution web radio (section starts around 19:42) that Wales was "a fraud" who erroneously claimed to be the creator of Wikipedia in order to attract funding for Wikia:

[Wales] just got a bunch of people to give him a bunch of money thinking, 'Oh, this is the guy who created Wikipedia.' Well guess what? He didn't create Wikipedia. Larry Sanger did.

Calacanis' outburst prompted an IE reporter to contact Sanger for comments. Sanger was Wikipedia's first employee from 2001 to 2002, during which time he proposed using the wiki software to advance Wales' encyclopedia concept. Sanger has decried his omission before; he was called co-founder as recently as 2004, but afterwards forgotten, sometimes with the help of Wales' own edits as reported by a Workbench blogger and later the New York Times. Sanger believes the motivations are financial:[1]

In 2004, at just the time when he was leaving out any mention of me in discussing the history of Wikipedia, he was starting Wikia...That's also when the star of Wikipedia really began to rise and started to enter into public consciousness. Jimmy Wales had a real financial motive to portray himself as the brains behind Wikipedia.

When solicited for a response, Wales stated that "I think very highly of Larry Sanger, and think that it is unfortunate that this silly debate has tended to overshadow his work." He saved his ire for Calacanis, calling him "a showman" trying to "generate easy publicity for himself."

Calacanis and Wales had had a much-publicized earlier fallout in 2006 after Wales rejected a proposal by Calacanis to introduce advertising on Wikipedia, see Signpost issue October 30, 2006. The recent comment about Sanger was made in a similar context: Asked by the interviewer why he expected his human search engine project Mahalo.com to succeed despite Wales' failure with his similar project Wikia Search, Calacanis retorted that "there is a big misconception that Jimmy Wales is some huge genius", arguing that he lacked business acumen:

[To make Wikipedia a non-profit] was the worst business decision in the history of business. Not since the Indians sold Manhattan has somebody made a stupider move in the history of business. Literally. The 11 or 12 dollars that the Indians got for Manhattan was a better deal than what Jimmy Wales did. Jimmy Wales would be a billionaire right now. Wikipedia would be worth 25 to 50 billion dollars and Jimmy Wales would own 80, 90 percent of it. He'd be in the top 50 richest people on the planet ...

Conservative U.S. talk show host Rush Limbaugh has lashed out against false information on Wikipedia, Wikiquote, and many newscasters who have relied on them as sources. Limbaugh's online blog called numerous reporters "professional scum...responsible in many ways for the deteriorating standards and quality of journalism" because they attributed unsourced quotes to him that were taken from Wikipedia. The quotes in question were first added to Wikiquote by an IP address that blogger Trapdoc traced to a computer at the law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, as reported by The American Thinker blog. The row comes in the wake of Limbaugh's failed bid to buy the St. Louis Rams professional football team.

CNN profiled the user-created Chinese language encyclopedia Hudong this week in "It's tricky for wikis and online encyclopedias in China". Hudong was started in 2005 but already has over 3 million articles; in comparison, Chinese Wikipedia launched in 2002 but has less than 10% as many articles as Hudong.

Explaining Hudong's success compared to Wikipedia and to competitor Baidu Baike, Hudong's founder Pan Haidong said "We know the market better. That is why we can get a bigger share of it." Chinese Wikipedia had also been blocked in mainland China for most of its existence, although it is no longer blocked. The article quotes Baidu chief scientist William Chang: "There's, in fact, no reason for China to use Wikipedia, a service based 'out there'. It's very natural for China to make its own products."

• The Guardian published an online Q&A with Jimmy Wales and named Wikipedia the #2 most life-changing website of the decade (behind Google).
• Private Eye reported that the magazine History Today intended to insert three paragraphs from the Wikipedia article on Engelbert Dollfuss directly into the article A.D. Harvey wrote for the magazine on that subject. Harvey strongly objected to the inclusion of the plagiarised material and it was removed prior to publication.
• The Observer reported a computer in the House of Commons was used last June to remove politically embarrassing information about Michał Kamiński three days after he became leader of the European Conservatives and Reformists in the European Parliament.
• The video "A Complete History of Nickelback Wikipedia Page Vandalisms" documents the insults and vandalism that have appeared in the article of the oft-maligned rock band Nickelback.

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• 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]
• On China there's also [Foundation-l] Comparison of Chinese Wikipedia, Hudong and Baidu Baike. --Nemo 12:49, 27 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]