Citizendium Blog

I have usually bitten my tongue in the four or five years since Jimmy Wales stopped crediting me as co-founder of Wikipedia. There are many things I have not said, or that I could say more pointedly, but which I did not. This is partly because I don’t like a scandal, but mostly it’s because I was raised to be modest, and to press my advantage always seemed in bad taste to me (even if it’s de rigeur for so many). But I will no longer mince words when Jimmy Wales continues to lie and misrepresent to the media — as he has done in a recent Hot Press interview the contents of which I’ve seen — about my role. It is deeply disappointing that Wales continues on shamelessly as he has been doing, after this long, and in spite of the shockingly poor match between his claims and the living record available online. The interview I mentioned, along with the recent rediscovery of a comment in which Wales called himself “co-founder” of Wikipedia in 2002, are really the straw that broke this camel’s back.

So, in addition to giving a pointed interview and blow-by-blow reply to the same writer who interviewed Wales, I’ve added a note to the “My role in Wikipedia” page on my personal website. Here it is, a note about the word “founder”:

I believe “founder” is used in two closely-related ways, depending on whether the thing founded is either a business enterprise, on the one hand, or a community project, movement, etc., on the other hand. In a business context, frequently, the founders of an enterprise are its original funders or sponsors. In a community context, however, the founders are those who had the most personal influence in getting a community started. So, for example, we might say the French government was a “founder” of the United States in the business sense, while Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin were among the community founders.

So, on the one hand, we can say that Bomis, Inc. was the founder of Wikipedia in the “business sense.” Strictly speaking, the “business founder” of Wikipedia was not Jimmy Wales individually, since it was Bomis that paid the bills for Wikipedia (including my paycheck), and Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis were, to the best of my knowledge, equal partners and co-owners of Bomis, Inc.

On the other hand — and I am sorry to have to say this myself, because I know it sounds so immodest coming from my own mouth, but after the events of recent years I just want the truth stated clearly — I have a much stronger claim than Jimmy Wales has to being a founder of Wikipedia in the community sense. As you can see from the evidence above, and as I think most people who were there will attest, I was far more active than he was in the first 14 months of the project, and my influence on the community, in terms of organizational work, general policy, and important decisions was far greater than his. For anyone wondering what I could possibly mean by this, I would point to my memoir for clarification. I’d also like to point out that Jimmy Wales has written no similar memoir, because he really did not do that very much in the community to write about. If he ever does write a memoir of the events of the first 14 months of Wikipedia, he knows I will be on hand to keep him honest.

Finally, I submit that, since Wikipedia is best known and most useful not as a “business enterprise” but as a free resource and worldwide non-profit community, the most relevant sense of foundership is not the business sense but the community sense.