Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 16:56, 8 April 2009

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Archives

Index -index- As of January 16, 2003 September – December 2005 January 2006 January – February 2006 February 2006 February 2006, cont. March 2006 April 2006 - late May 2006 May 24 - July 2006 July 2006 - August 2006 August 2006 Most of September 2006 Late September 2006 - Early November 2006 Most of November 2006 Late November 2006 - December 8, 2006 December 9, 2006 - Mid January 2007 From December 22, 2006 blanking Mid January 2007 - Mid February 2007 Mid February 2007- Feb 25, 2007 From March 2, 2007 blanking March 2-5, 2007 March 5-11, 2007 March 11 - April 3, 2007 April 2 - May 2, 2007 May 3 - June 7, 2007 June 9 - July 4, 2007 July 13 - August 17, 2007 August 17 - September 11, 2007 September 14 - October 7, 2007 October 28 - December 1, 2007 December 2 - December 16, 2007 December 15 - January 4, 2008 January 4 - January 30, 2008 January 30 - February 28, 2008 February 28 - March 11, 2008 March 9 - April 18, 2008 April 18 - May 30, 2008 May 30 - July 27, 2008 July 26 - October 4, 2008 October 4 - November 12, 2008 November 10 - December 10, 2008 December 5 - December 25, 2008 December 25 - January 16, 2009 January 15 - January 27, 2009 January 26 - February 10, 2009 February 8 - March 18, 2009 March 18 - May 6, 2009 May 5 - June 9, 2009 June 10 - July 11, 2009 July 12 - August 29, 2009

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No sock puppetry

Jimmy Wales, please turn down any suspected sockpuppetry on your account. It might just be vandalism. Ms dos mode (talk) 00:09, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

It's just an April fools' joke posted by someone. Nothing to worry about. Chamal 02:05, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

No April Fools' joke

No, it isn't an April Fools' joke. -->Why would she wink at my section of discussion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ms dos mode (talk • contribs) 00:35, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

You did see all the[REDACTED] jokes on april fools day. so just give it a rest as we all need to have some fun on[REDACTED] after all does it realy mater if we have fun mattman (talk) 07:19, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Quick hello and thanks

Given that I've been here some three and a half years, I figure it's time to at least say hello to the leader behind such an amazing project! I usually don't like to become such a significant part of anything, but what a beauty it is that anyone can do as little or as much as they want. For a period of time, I left the project, having convinced myself that my academic and artistic pursuits required more of my time. As if slapped in the face by fate, I realized I needed this outlet, and so here I am to stay. I know you probably get stories like this very often, but I have to thank and congratulate you for the site. May each year be as successful as the last! --♬♩ Hurricanehink (talk) 04:10, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

TERRIBLE THING ABOUT THE[REDACTED] LOGO

I recently found out that the Chinese character on the logo of wiki was wrong. As a native Chinese, I know perfectly well that that character should be written as 祖. An additional dot on the globe could be seen. Please correct it right away. Sammy312 (talk) 02:52, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

personally i believe that on the english wikipdia nobody will notice mattman (talk) 07:20, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

There are several mistakes on the logo, we know all about them and hopefully they will be fixed sooner or later. It's easier said than done, though, unfortunately. --Tango (talk) 18:35, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

In particular, see meta:Talk:Misplaced Pages/Logo#The proposed Chinese character in particular and that page in general for recent discussion. - BanyanTree 03:47, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

It's a serious question, so let's stop this fussing

Jimbo, under established precedent of users being able to re-add edits from banned users if they are willing to take responsibility for said edit, may I please ask the following question, one which has been added and removed from here countless times, causing more "drama" than the actual question.

Jimbo, could you please explain why in August 2002, you introduced yourself as "co-founder" of Misplaced Pages; but in May 2007, you declared yourself the "sole founder" of Misplaced Pages?

Many thanks GTD 12:22, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Looks like a typo.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:38, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Are you sure you want to go with that answer, Jimmy? It doesn't sound very credible.

No, it wasn't a typo. I recall you referring to yourself as "co-founder" a number times. I remember being distinctly annoyed when, in 2004, you started referring to yourself as the (singular) founder of Misplaced Pages. If we were to scour other archives from late 2001, 2002, and 2003, I'm sure we would find other instances--to say nothing of the first three official press releases. --Larry Sanger (talk) 15:43, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a tiny mind" - Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rodhullandemu 12:38, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

There is a very good description of the whole co-founder/founder issue at Larry Sanger#Origins of Misplaced Pages with lots of sources. --Tango (talk) 18:37, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

So.... it's established that Jimbo Wales came up with the idea of an online encyclopedia, he ran the company that employed Larry Sanger, and the 'wiki' bit had by then been used by thousands of sites/intranets since 1994 as a collaborative structure? The term 'co-founder' implies parity, yet one was the boss and one was the employee. As a caring, sharing boss no doubt he was happy to share the plaudits with employees, but at the end of the day he was the one responsible for founding Misplaced Pages. Why is this still a debate?Little grape (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 16:18, 8 April 2009 (UTC).

Hi Jimmy

How often do you check your Wikia email & how long does it take to reply normally?

Cheers —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dottydotdot (talk • contribs) 18:34, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

I check it daily and I'm on it more or less all the time. Response times can vary widely. At the moment, I have it more or less under control with only 94 pending items, the oldest being December 21st.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:40, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

An open letter to Jimmy Wales

Jimmy, I don't know a better place than this for an open letter to you. I recently read the Hot Press interview with you. The lies and distortions it contains are, for me, the last straw, especially after this came to light, in which you described yourself as "co-founder" in 2002.

I've reached out to you on a couple of occasions to coordinate our "versions"--well, my version and your fanciful inventions--about how Misplaced Pages got started. Last year I read about a speech in which you represented me as being more or less opposed to Misplaced Pages from the start--despite it being my own baby, really--and I wrote to you saying that if you keep this up, I will speak out. Well, I'm finally speaking out.

In Misplaced Pages's first three years, it was clear to everyone working on it that not only had I named the project, I came up with and promoted the idea of making a wiki encyclopedia, wrote the first policy pages and many more policy pages in the following year, led the project, and enforced many rules that are now taken for granted. I came up with a lot of stuff that is regarded as standard operating procedure. For instance, I argued that talk should go on talk pages and got people into that habit. Similarly, after meta-discussion started taking up so much of Misplaced Pages's time and energy, I shepherded talk about the project to meta.wikipedia.org--and after that, to Misplaced Pages-L and WikiEN-L. I insisted that we were working on an encyclopedia, not on the many other things one can use a wiki for. I came up with the name "Wikipedian" and other Misplaced Pages jargon. I had devised a neutrality policy for Nupedia, and I elaborated it in a form that stood for several years on Misplaced Pages. I did a lot of explaining and evangelizing for Misplaced Pages--what it is about, why we are here, and so forth--for example, in Misplaced Pages:Our Replies to Our Critics and a couple of well-known posts on kuro5hin.org like this one and this. I also recall introducing many specific policy details, the evidence for which is in archives (such as on archive.org) and no doubt in the memories of some of the more active early Wikipedians.

These are only some examples of ways in which I led the project in its first 14 months; after I left, there was a lot of soul-searching in the project about what would happen now that it was "leaderless" (see the quotations linked from this page). When I was involved in the project, I was regarded as its chief organizer. As you can still see in the archives, I called myself "Chief Instigator" and "Chief Organizer" and the like (not editor).

I also want to correct you on something that tends to harm me: your repeated insinuations that I was "fired." In the Hot Press interview, you said I left Misplaced Pages because you "didn't want to pay him any more." You know--and so does everyone else who worked at Bomis, Inc., around a dozen people--that at the end of 2001, you had to go back to Bomis' original 4-5 employees, because of the tech market bust, when Bomis suddenly lost a million-dollar ad deal. Tim Shell told me I was the last person to be laid off. He told me--the day I arrived back from my honeymoon, as I recall--that I should probably start looking for new work, because of the market. I was made to believe, and always did until a few years ago when you started implying otherwise, that I had been laid off just like all the other Bomis employees.

In those first three years, Misplaced Pages did three press releases, in which we are both given credit as founders of the project. I drafted the first press release in January 2002; you read and approved it before posting it on the wires. Moreover, you must have read the many early news articles that called us both founders. You could have complained then--when you were CEO of the company that paid my paycheck. But you didn't. In fact, you called yourself "co-founder" from time to time. Evidence of this has surfaced in the form of this post to xodp in which you begin, "Hello, let me introduce myself. I'm Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages, the open content encyclopedias." While your company supplied the funding and you supplied some guidance, I supplied the main leadership of the early project. This is why Misplaced Pages's second press release also called me "founder," in 2003--just after I broke permanently with you and the Misplaced Pages community--and the Wikimedia Foundation's first press release described me the same way, in early 2004.

I had nothing to do with the second and third press releases, and, as Bomis CEO and Wikimedia Chair, you approved all three. But now read what you told Hot Press recently. The interviewer asked: "Sanger said that proof of his being co-founder is on the initial press releases. Are you saying that he basically just put himself down as co-founder on these press releases?" You answered "Yes." How could I "put myself down as co-founder" in 2003 and 2004, when I wasn't even part of the organization? This is an attempt to buff your reputation while making me look like a liar--but your simple "Yes" answer can be refuted with a few URLs; you were a contact on all three press releases.

Beginning in 2004, you began leaving me out of the story of Misplaced Pages's origin. You began implying, to reporters, that you had done a lot of the sort of work that, in fact, you hired me to do. You have even implied that I was opposed to various ideas that were crucial to Misplaced Pages's popular success--when those were, for all intents and purposes, my own ideas. A good example is Daniel Pink's article for Wired Magazine--in which you implied that I had little or nothing to do with Misplaced Pages.

You still do this. You told the Hot Press interviewer, "Larry was never comfortable with the open-editing model of Misplaced Pages and he very early on wanted to start locking things down and giving certain people special authority--you know, recruit experts to supervise certain areas of the encyclopaedia and things like that." This is a lie. I was perfectly comfortable with the "open-editing model of Misplaced Pages." After all, that was my idea. I did not want to "start locking things down"----or to "recruit experts to supervise certain areas of the encyclopaedia." I challenge anyone to find any evidence in the archive that I did any such thing. For my early attitude toward expert involvement, see this column, written a year after the project started. Besides, your claim doesn't make sense. Even after a year, I was hoping that a revitalized Nupedia would work in tandem with Misplaced Pages as its vetting service. Though you increasingly disliked Nupedia as Misplaced Pages's star rose, it was always my assumption that you felt the same way about at least the potential of the two projects working together.

It was one thing, in 2004, to leave me out of the story of Misplaced Pages. It was another to assert in 2005, (1) for the very first time, that somebody else had the idea for the project, contrary to what had been on the books since 2001, or (2) that I am not co-founder of the project. But in both cases, people scanning the Misplaced Pages-L mailing list archives found old mails in which you contradicted yourself. One embarrassing mail has you giving me credit--as, of course, I always had been given credit--for the idea of Misplaced Pages, and another embarrassing mail surfaced just a few days ago in which you called yourself "co-founder" of Misplaced Pages.

I find your behavior since 2004 transparently self-serving, considering that this rewriting of history began in 2004, just as Wikia.com was getting started, and you started promoting your reputation as the brains behind Misplaced Pages. There is a long "paper trail" establishing virtually all of my claims about Misplaced Pages, and which refute your various attempts to rewrite history.

I have not publicly confronted you about this before, to this extent. Public controversies are emotionally wrenching and time-consuming. I know I might be (verbally) attacked more viciously than ever by your fans and Misplaced Pages's. (To them, I just point out that Misplaced Pages is bigger than Jimmy Wales.) I have mainly limited myself to answering reporters' questions--keeping my more harshly-worded statements off the record--and to this page on my personal site. Occasionally I couldn't help objecting to some particularly outrageous claim, but I never went all out.

I thought that the evidence against your claims about me would shame you into changing your behavior. But, five years since you started misrepresenting my role in the founding of Misplaced Pages, you're still at it.

I have been content to watch you reap the rewards of the project I started for you, largely without comment. You (with Tim Shell and Michael Davis, the Bomis partners) did, after all, sponsor the project. After leaving Misplaced Pages, I went back to academia and, after that, worked for a succession of nonprofit projects--these days, Citizendium.org and now also WatchKnow.org. I have not tried to cash in on my own reputation. I have been approached by a number of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and publishers and have always told them that I have my own plans. If I had wanted to cash in myself, I wouldn't have moved away from Silicon Valley back to Ohio, as I did, in order to lower my costs in supporting the non-profit projects which I've made my life's work.

The Hot Press interview is the straw that broke this camel's back. I resent being the victim of another person's self-serving lies. Besides, I don't want to set a poor example in my failure to defend myself.

Please don't say I'm making mountains out of molehills. When you go out of your way to edit Misplaced Pages articles to remove the fact that I am a co-founder, or ask others to do so, I don't call that correcting "very simple errors," as you told Hot Press. What angers me is not any one error, but the accumulated weight of your lies about me--I've mentioned only a few of them here.

Finally, you might protest that you have said, several times, that I am not credited enough. For example, you told Hot Press:

I feel that Larry's work is often under-appreciated. He really did a lot in the first year to think through editorial policy. ... I would actually love to have it on the record that I said: I think Larry's work should be more appreciated. He's a really brilliant guy.

This sounds like a fine sentiment. But how could it be sincere? What better way to ensure that I am "under-appreciated" than to contradict your own first three press releases and tell the Boston Globe, just two years later, that it's "preposterous" that I am called co-founder?

I have two further requests, not of you, but of those who deal with you: the Wikimedia Foundation and reporters.

First, I ask the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation to reiterate the Foundation's original position (as expressed in its first press release) that we are both, in fact, founders of Misplaced Pages. (I note that the author of the recent history of Misplaced Pages, Andrew "fuzheado" Lih, was among the authors and contacts for this press release.) If the Foundation is unwilling, I request an explanation why its corporate view has changed. Is it simply because Jimmy Wales has made his wishes known and you enforce them?

Second, I request any reporter who interviews you about the early history of Misplaced Pages and Nupedia to interview me as well, so I can correct anything misleading. They should know that there are many details in my 2005 memoir of Nupedia and Misplaced Pages, and my story has never varied. I would also appreciate it if a reporter were to inquire about my request, above, to the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation.

--Larry Sanger (talk) 15:38, 8 April 2009 (UTC) (sanger@citizendium.org)

Comments

He was the boss, you were the employee. 'Co-Founder' implies parity. There was no parity.Little grape (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 16:24, 8 April 2009 (UTC).

Little grape, stop drinking thy fruits.--Scott Mac (Doc) 16:32, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

• I was going to comment along the same lines. At some point it comes down to semantics. Certainly from your description you helped found Misplaced Pages, but typically the boss of a project is given credit as the founder (whether or not they do all the work). I see no reason why someone couldn't say Sanger was one of the founders, but I also don't any reason why it wouldn't be reasonable and appropriate to call Jimmy Wales the founder. ChildofMidnight (talk) 16:37, 8 April 2009 (UTC)