
Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire - kanamekun
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/magazine/jimmy-wales-is-not-an-internet-billionaire.html?pagewanted=all
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tokenadult
I've met Jimbo Wales exactly once in person. I've interacted with him by email
a few times in relation to that meeting and mutual parenting interests, and
also in connection with some Wikipedia business. We last corresponded a few
years ago. I know other persons mentioned in the article considerably better.

As other comments have already said, the submitted article is a personality
profile article, and it's written in the manner of such articles. It is not
meant to be a comprehensive account of Wikipedia and doesn't purport to be. I
found it interesting, because I learned a few facts about some people I know
in person that I hadn't known before.

The passion to build a worldwide online encyclopedia is a passion that can be
shared by anyone who read encyclopedias for fun as a child--one thing I have
in common with Wales. I think Wikipedia will have its greatest impact if
someone can figure out the economic model and organizational model that makes
possible a credible Wikipedia competitor--something like Google coming along
when AltaVista looked unbeatable. Its position as unchallenged leader among
online encyclopedias right now is both Wikipedia's greatest strength and
Wikipedia's greatest weakness. A lot of the content on Wikipedia and a lot of
the community experience would be most likely to become better for users and
better for volunteer editors if there were a prominent competitor equally
visible to readers, accessible to volunteer editors, and appealing to donors.

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csmatt
Can we all take a second to appreciate what this man accomplished? Wikipedia's
success relied on getting people to write about a variety of topics (aka be
content generators) and others to read and fact check to provide a useful
experience. It was crowdsourcing long before it was a buzzword and it's still
working.

~~~
netcan
It was crowdsourcing before it was a buzzword. Social too.

Wikipedia is arguably the internet's biggest achievement. Free. Valuable.
Accurate. Up to Date. Volunteer run. Non Profit. Efficient. We can see the
sausage being made.

It's really the gold standard for a website.

~~~
Nursie
I'm not sure it's that perfect. Try putting up a new page sometime and watch
how quickly someone with _zero_ domain knowledge will come and try to have it
deleted, usually successfully.

~~~
lukifer
To me, deletionist culture is Wikipedia's greatest flaw. If at least two
people derive value from a page existing, and it meets all the other criteria,
it should be allowed to stand.

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GabrielF00
Generally the NY Times Magazine does an excellent job, but this was a poor
article. Lots of personal fluff about Wales and his high-powered friends and
nothing new or interesting about his role in Wikipedia or the challenges that
Wikipedia faces.

~~~
reeses
The repetition got to me. It could have been a fairly interesting article at
about 1/4 the length. The feature reporter gave the impression that they
believed saying the same thing multiple times would make it the truth.

So he's a phony who got lucky and...made no money. It's interesting to see the
targeting of someone for success along a different angle than politics,
insubstantial celebrity, or 'undeserved' wealth. (Coincidence that RMS is on
the front page of HN as well?)

The NYT has increasingly mixed its editorial content with its journalistic
content. Quite often, I'll scratch my head at a linked article and then notice
that it's blogs.nytimes.com or otherwise NYT-branded blogorrhea.

While they have to struggle to stay relevant, it's unfortunate that they've
largely gone the HuffPo route instead of consolidating their strengths. It
makes it confusing when reading event-based reporting, trying to discern the
agenda.

~~~
lazyjones
> got lucky and...made no money.

I find it difficult to believe that. He's in an influential position at what
many people consider the reference for the "truth" and there are many wealthy
and powerful people out there interested in distorting that truth where it
suits them. It's not terribly difficult to hide money from dubious sources and
bribery around Wikipedia isn't something I just made up:
[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/10/13/wikipedias-dark-
sid...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/10/13/wikipedias-dark-side/)

~~~
GabrielF00
I'm sure he can use his position of influence to make money via speaking fees,
service on boards, consulting fees, that sort of thing, but the idea that
Wales himself is accepting money in exchange for favorable edits is laughable.
He's the most scrutinized person on Wikipedia and there are people who object
to pretty much everything he does. He could theoretically use alternate
accounts, but that would mean risking a permanent ban from Wikipedia which
would be extremely foolish, since he would lose all credibility.

------
neilk
The article misses that he continues to be an important figure in the
community (beyond the categorization of hummus). For example, his involvement
in the SOPA strike was crucial. Jimmy didn't decide or even initiate anything.
But after ideas had been bubbling and percolating through the community for a
few weeks, he focused people's attention, and made the issue credible to the
majority of Wikipedians.

Jimmy is disappointing if you're looking for a saint. He's made a lot of
mistakes. (I think he'd be the first to tell you that.) If he is exceptional
in any way, I think it's that he is comfortable being a leader almost in the
conventional mold, but he's also comfortable yielding to the full power of
peer production. Maybe, ultimately, he can explain that kind of leadership to
elites in the rest of the world, too.

Disclosure: I don't know Wales well, but I worked for the WMF (after his
principal involvement) and have met him socially a couple of times.

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adventured
Wales must not own very much of Wikia, if his holdings in it are worth less
than a million dollars. It's now one of the top web sites in the world. If it
is the case that he doesn't own much of it, he made a terrible financial
mistake in letting go of so much equity (or he simply didn't care).

Quantcast has it ranked #33 in the US market based on directly quantified
data, with nearly 2 million uniques a day and growing at a healthy clip. It
appears very likely to end up as a top 10 to 15 US site. That's worth a
substantial amount of money no matter how you cut it.

~~~
booruguru
Dude, it's a non-profit entity.

~~~
runn1ng
Wikia (not wikimedia!) is for profit, I would think.

Wikia are those "personal wikis" for TV shows/alternate universes/fan stuff in
general.

They also have annoying ads all over the place and all have really ugly
MediaWiki skins.

------
rollo_tommasi
This just in: Internet idol receives less-than-flattering personal profile,
Internet commentators disgruntled, have apparently never read a personal
profile article before.

God help the NYT if they ever run a less-than-godlike profile of, say, Elon
Musk.

------
yardie
I've used wikis and wikipedia for a long time and I guess from the article
some people have a problem with Wales because he wanted one thing and got even
luckier by getting something else.

The underlying tone of the article is he isn't sincere because he could have
cashed wikipedia out at any time (like IMDB and CDDB have before) and the
reporter is waiting for him to do just that. I guess the fact that he was a
trader before adds to it because traders are only ever about money.

In this day and age people can't have the interest of greater good and there
always has to be an ulterior motive.

------
kristofferR
He's obviously not a billionaire, but earning just $1 million from Wikia seems
way too low considering how popular he network is.

72 000 000 ad page views per month should earn him quite a bit, unless he sold
his stock way too early.

~~~
bpicolo
Wikipedia doesn't have ads.

~~~
kristofferR
I'm not talking about Wikipedia, I'm talking about Wikia ;)

Wikia.com is a network of wikis that he founded. A really popular network that
hosts the official Star Trek wiki among thousands of others.

------
littletables
IMO, this is a confusing puff piece with gaps you could drive a truck through.
Typically for a serious profile, people from key timeframe points in a
subject's life are interviewed as well, to prevent the story from being biased
in favor of the subject's POV and to round out events for the historical
record. This was not done here.

Also, points in this article are flatly incorrect. In one section the author
states that Wales has said "mum" (nothing) about Edward Snowden, when the
opposite is true (and in current headlines - Techmeme cluster here:
[http://www.techmeme.com/130625/p49#a130625p49](http://www.techmeme.com/130625/p49#a130625p49)).
Wales' interest in finding Snowden's identity as a Wikipedia editor - against
Wikipedia rules - can be plainly seen on Wales' talk page dated June 25, two
days before this NYT article
([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&oldid=561872841#Snowden_editing.3F)).

This NYT article is very confusing. How much else in it is inaccurate? Was it
a PR stunt?

------
nollidge
Please tell me more about this turtleneck he was wearing.

~~~
kristopolous
it's part of that narrative editorial style that turns 1 paragraph of content
to 7 pages of sprawl.

------
Pxtl
That's quite a hatchet job there. I don't know what I think about Jim Wales,
but I'm pretty sure the author of this piece is a nasty little person.

------
narwally
"Garvey doesn't have a Wikipedia page"

Well that didn't take long.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Garvey](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Garvey)

------
lotsofcows
"Wales uses a cheap smartphone made by the Chinese company Huawei that a
friend bought him for $85 in Nairobi."

$85? Cheap? In Nairobi? Is that a typo?

~~~
beachstartup
no, see, there's this whole world out there, outside of the US.

~~~
lotsofcows
What?

My point - as it seems I've failed to write sufficiently clearly - is that $85
seems very expensive for a "cheap" smartphone. Especially for equatorial
Africa.

Also, I'm not in the US.

