[Foundation-l] Jimmy Wales in the news

Fri Mar 7 13:10:06 UTC 2008

On 07/03/2008, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

> on 3/7/08 1:36 AM, SlimVirgin at slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > There are also the hundreds of unpaid man hours Jimbo has put into the
> > project. Not to mention that if he'd retained ownership of Wikipedia,
> > he might now be worth an absolute fortune.
>
> How would "owning Wikipedia" increase someone's fortune, Sarah?

If you owned Wikipedia - whatever that nebulous term might mean - I am
quite, quite sure you could sell that 'ownership' to some sucker for
quite a lot of money tomorrow just by waving around the name.

More seriously, direct ownership is control, and implies you get any
incoming funds. It's effectively the capacity to monetise the site at
will, to say "as of tomorrow, there's ads". That's quite a valuable
potential, even if you don't decide to exercise it.

I believe someone on this list has done a worst-case
back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much could be made if it was
decided to "strip-mine" Wikipedia for fiscal gain - if you implemented
advertising and so on without any particular concern for pissing off
the community, or for sustaining goodwill in the long term. Quite what
order of magnitude you might make off it is debatable, but it'd
certainly be comfortable!

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk