[Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

Mon May 10 10:51:52 UTC 2010

On 05/10/2010 03:11 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
> On 10/05/10 15:25, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva wrote:
>    
>> BTW, I also have a broader question. Who entrusted power to the Board
>> of Trustees?
>>      
> Jimmy Wales determined the structure of the Wikimedia Foundation when
> he created it. He and Bomis donated the relevant assets, such as the
> domain names, to the Foundation at the time it was formed.
>
> We should remember, when we criticise his use of whatever remnant of
> power that he has left, that he could have easily structured Wikimedia
> as a for-profit entity, with him retaining majority control. We have
> Jimmy to thank for Wikimedia's non-profit status, its open-source
> software stack and its free content license.
>    

That isn't really true, though. He recruited volunteers with the promise 
of the free-content license for sure, and with a sort of implicit 
promise of a generally free-culture / volunteer-run encyclopedia. If he 
had *not* promised anything, he would have had many more troubles 
recruiting volunteers. You do remember that GNUpedia was gearing up to 
serve as a competitor, and only backed down because Jimmy gave them 
enough assurances that Wikipedia was such a free-culture encyclopedia 
that their efforts would be redundant?

In short, Jimmy could not have gone the for-profit or non-free-culture 
route, because he would have been left more pitiful than Citizendium: a 
project with no contributors.

-Mark