Seth Finkelstein sums up the open letter to-do
In an informative update, Seth Finkelstein has summed up the fallout to my Open Letter to Jimmy Wales. Among other things, Florence Devouard, former Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, is quoted as saying, “I know it will only be a small satisfaction, but I wanted to mention that in the French speaking user guide book I recently co-wrote with Guillaume Paumier, you are recognised as a co-founder.”
Yes, that is a small satisfaction, thank you, Florence. It would be nice if the Board of Trustees were to issue a statement reiterating its original 2004 position on the foundership issue. It would also be nice to read a public statement that it no longer considers Jimmy Wales to be a reliable source when it comes to matters of the early history of Wikipedia. I won’t hold my breath.
Thank you Florence Devouard!
Now I hope that you’re not portrayed as being complaintive about a trivial issue
Comment by Chunbum Park — April 15, 2009 @ 12:15 pm
Isn’t Florence Devouard sort of a “disgruntled former employee”, a la Danny Wool? I hear the world is “full of” them.
One of my favorite videos EVER to watch:
http://news.cnet.com/1606-2-6233396.html
“It has not been a great week for the Wikimedia Foundation.”
The squirming, the evasion, the denial, the deflecting. You just can’t beat it.
Comment by Gregory Kohs — April 16, 2009 @ 2:51 pm
Can you guys start the article about horror fiction? I will be linking to it shortly. Britannica has an article about horror stories that I think you guys can best. I would like to begin linking in to Citizendium.
Comment by Timothy Perle — April 20, 2009 @ 10:36 pm
I’m also linking to the non-existent article about Abbie Hoffman because I think you guys could do a better job at this than Britannica’s current article. I want to support this project and may join up at a later date.
Comment by Timothy Perle — April 20, 2009 @ 11:34 pm
Look, whether you co-founded it or not doesn’t matter. You pulled out of the project. What will you gain by being recoginsed as co-founder? To me this whole thing looks like a publicity stunt.
Comment by Guy — May 6, 2009 @ 3:04 am
I want to thank you for the creation of wikipedia. It is amazing the amount of knowledge that it possesses!
Toy did a great job for the human kind.
Comment by Ioannis Karamitros — May 15, 2009 @ 11:01 am
And I want to thank you for the creation of Wikipedia too, but more importantly, I want to thank you for the creation of Citizendium, a site that can one day be just as prominent as Wikipedia provided that it continues to fill with articles. If it eventually has 800,000 or so articles, it will be prominent by default because sites with that many pages of quality content tend to get a great deal of traffic from the SERPS and as a result, are linked to often, which builds self-reinforcing authority.
I saw in that CNET video Sue Gardner said, “[Jimmy Wales] is a modest guy; he’s a frugal guy. Jimmy has never done anything wrong.” Dr. Sanger, have you had past dealings with Sue Gardner? What do you think of her?
Comment by Will — May 21, 2009 @ 8:39 pm
I know nothing at all about Sue Gardner. She is brand new to the Wikipedia fold. But she doesn’t know Jimmy Wales.
Comment by Larry Sanger — May 22, 2009 @ 8:26 am