Anna, That too is largely due to volunteers. In early February 2002 for example, Jimmy spoke of putting advertising on Wikipedia, saying on the Wikipedia-l mailing list:[1][2]
---o0o--- However, with the ongoing hard times in the Internet economy, we do anticipate adding some forms of advertising to the site in the near future. ---o0o--- The result of these plans being aired on the mailing list was a user revolt. The entire Spanish Wikipedia community jumped ship: they forked and created their own project, the Enciclopedia Libre. It took the Spanish Wikipedia years to catch up with and overtake EL. Edgar Enyedy, one of the leaders of that revolt, shared his reminiscences with Wired's Nathaniel Tkacz in 2011:[3] ---o0o--- [...] *The clash that led to your departure from Wikipedia was sparked by a seemingly insignificant remark, made by Sanger in passing about the possibility of incorporating advertising in order to fund his future work on the encyclopaedia(s). His exact words were, "Bomis might well start selling ads on Wikipedia sometime within the next few months".[4] Can you revisit this event and tell us how it unfolded? * The possibility of advertising was out of the question. I asked Wales for a public commitment that there would be no advertising, but this only came after we left. Apart from those already mentioned (Sanger's role and the autonomy of the Spanish version) there were other points of disagreement. Firstly, all Wikipedia domains (.com, .org, .net) were owned by Wales. I asked myself "why are we working for a dot com?" I asked for Wikipedia to be changed to a dot org. [...] Because of these things, I didn't trust Wales' intentions. Not at all. We were all working for free in a dot com with no access to the servers, no mirrors, no software updates, no downloadable database, and no way to set up the wiki itself. Finally, came the possibility of incorporating advertising, so we left. It couldn't be any other way. I would like to remark upon the fact that as it is known today, the International Wikipedia that you all know and have come to take for granted, might have been impossible without the Spanish fork. Wales was worried that other foreign communities would follow our fork. He learnt from us what to do and what not to do in future. ---o0o--- It's an interesting article, and a fascinating bit of Wikipedia history. At one point, Jimmy Wales apparently envisaged selling hard copies (!) of the encyclopedias; hence the GNU/FDL licence. The point is, user revolts have always been a significant part of making Wikipedia what it is today. This includes its being an ad-free non-profit. Andreas [1] Feb. 2, 2002 mailing list post by Jimmy Wales: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-February/001279.html [2] http://larrysanger.org/2011/01/jimmy-wales-on-advertisement/ [3] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-01/20/wikipedia-spanish-fork/viewall [4] Feb. 13, 2002 mailing list post by Larry Sanger: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-February/001444.html On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 4:58 AM, Anna Stillwell <astillw...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Andreas, > > > It's important to understand that Jimmy Wales didn't accomplish the > things > you speak of alone. > > Yes, I'm aware of this. Perhaps I should have been more clear. I was > pointing to the fact that Jimmy did not mess it up. I don't ever > underestimate that. Jimmy could have not allowed that to happen, he could > have charged money, he could have done a lot of other things, and he did > not. He did not mess it up and that is really saying something. > > Warmly, > /a > > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
