On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 2:31 AM, David Goodman <[email protected]> wrote: > thousands, yes. Even conservapedia has thousands. But millions? > > I have no objection to working for a profit making enterprise. But > when I do, I want my share of the money.
I imagine Wikia has millions of articles, all told. Gaia Online <http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/> has more than 1.7 *billion* posts. Facebook and YouTube both get user-contributed content on comparable or greater scales than Wikipedia. Sure, they have lower quality standards and you have to scale down the quantity accordingly for a fair comparison, but that doesn't defeat the point. All are run by for-profit corporations, and nobody cares. They contribute for their own reasons, and view the ads as a necessary burden. Open-source software is another good comparison. Many of the biggest projects are controlled by businesses, which profit off them extensively. But nobody minds, not even Richard Stallman. People are just as happy to be Ubuntu or Fedora maintainers as Debian maintainers. They don't ask for a cut of the money, because they know the business is reinvesting the profit in the project itself. Basically, all of Web 2.0 is built on user contributions, but Wikipedia is the *only* major not-for-profit site out there. Every other very large site is for-profit. This suggests Wikipedia's not-for-profit status is a fluke, not an inevitability. People participate in these sites mainly for fun, status, or personal gain, not high-minded idealism. The number of Wikipedians who have convinced themselves otherwise only demonstrates how eager people are to believe in their own nobility. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
