

Motivation behind creating Wikipedia - ananthrk
http://business.in.com/column/zen-garden/daddy-has-kira-to-thank/812/0
Especially the answer to the question "Tell us about something deeply personal that helped you shape your world view, that has made Wikipedia what it is."
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buro9
I find articles like this strange.

Strange because I've created sites, and I know that the reasons to carry on
doing something morphs over time but that when asked it's easy to apply things
that affect us now to our actions in the past.

That is, I suspect that we are constantly re-writing our own view of history
based on personal experiences.

So I find them strange because the question is being asked now, rather than
then. And that means that the success of the project, in this case Wikipedia,
and it's resulting effect on the world (or however that should be phrased) has
already happened. And out of that unforeseen and unpredicted effects have also
happened. And that now, armed with the knowledge of the current effects it's
always easy to declare that said effect was actually our intent.

The article is clearly touching. But I wonder whether it really was an
epiphany moment that created the motivation to create Wikipedia or whether
it's closer to what I suspect which is that it wasa small action that was the
right thing at the right time, that has snow-balled into something vastly
greater, and that now it's easy to re-interpret the original small action into
being of greater meaning than it is.

Of course, I also suspect I'm just a cynic.

~~~
bkovitz
It was indeed an epiphany—really, a synthesis of a lot of ideas that were
fairly new and floating around at the time (wikis, Extreme Programming, free
content, and others).

The main idea of Wikipedia, even its combative/collaborative style and its
peculiar solution to the epistemological problem of getting reliable
knowledge, was cooked up in a flash of inspiration, and then talked out over a
single dinner. The main policy ideas did not take a whole lot longer to work
out, and they were mostly developed by one person—a philosophy Ph.D. who had a
thing about reliability and bias.

The majority of the work for a long time was the relentless
political/marketing effort to attract people to the Wikipedia community and
keep them agreed to the main social values that had been envisioned very
early.

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dan_the_welder
The paradigm of the internet is that it is user generated content. Wikipedia
succeeds because it is a concise metaphor of the internet.

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bkovitz
_"He pioneered the idea that user-driven content, and not the work of PhDs
working with a cave full of parchment, can be relied upon to throw light on
every conceivable subject in this world."_

Hrrmph. I don't want to take anything away from Wales, since his contributions
are indeed extraordinary: starting (and funding) Nupedia, funding Wikipedia,
managing it with just the right light touch, and continuing to spread the word
and get funding. But he did not pioneer this way of putting content together.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BenKovitz#I.27m_not_one_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BenKovitz#I.27m_not_one_of_the_founders)

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paraschopra
Anybody noticed the domain? Web18 group of India bought it for USD 1 million

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ananthrk
_"Are there deeply personal experiences that sometimes, lead to the creation
of great institutions?"_

This question is very interesting. Would be great to hear answers from start-
up founders here.

~~~
jgrahamc
Stanford University

<http://www.stanford.edu/about/history/>

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iamwil
And while interesting, from Wales point of view, I'd be a bit mortified to
have a deeply personal story told in perso to be printed on the web.

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yannis
Touching story and three cheers for Wales, the Open Source Movement and
Wikipedia.

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ars
Anyone know what the procedure was that they did for his daughter?

