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Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day

> Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome

Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article...

> It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki software would facilitate a good platform for an online encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided to give it a try later.

> The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger. He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth. Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000 articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several topics by the end of 2001.

He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.

View on HN

It's a very touchy subject for Wales. It caused him to walk out of an interview after 48 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswRbWyt_pg

Oh. Wow. I had no idea Jimmy Wales was like that. Enlightening.

Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.

From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today.

It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you.

If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.

EDIT: a couple downvotes denying the influence of specific “Wikipedia ideology” and politics.

Take a chance to edit articles and you will see how tedious it is.

There is also a lot of legal censorship. Celebrities putting pressure on removing info, or lobbies, or say things that are illegal or very frowned upon (for example questioning homosexuality, or the impact of certain wars).

Sometime it is legality, ideology, politics, funding, pressure, etc.

This is why you need to use different sources.

Yes LLMs that don't disclose sources are much better.

LLMs have their issues too.

In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5 subject-experts (“the LLMs”) in 20 seconds

some of them who are going to check on some news websites (most are also biased)

Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make your own opinions.

Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could be. Have they been trained on what their masters said to say ? Could be.

But multiplying the amount of LLMs reduce the risk.

For example, if you ask DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Claude, GLM-4.7 or some models that have no guardrails, what they think about XXX, then perhaps there are interesting insights.

This may shock you, but wikipedia provides multiple sources, it even links to them. Where do you think the LLMs are getting their data from?

To further this, articles also have an edit history and talk page. Even if one disagrees with consensus building or suspects foul play and they're really trying to get to the bottom of something, all the info is there on Wikipedia!

If one just wants a friendly black box to tell them something they want to hear, AI is known to do that.

LLMs disclose sources now.

Right. Try clicking those sources, half the time there is zero relation to the sentence. LLMs just output what they want to say, and then sprinkle in what the web search found on random sentences.

And not just bottom of the barrel LLMs. Ask Claude about Intel PIN tools, it will merrily tell you that it "Has thread-safe APIs but performance issues were noted with multi-threaded tools like ThreadSanitizer" and then cite the Disney Pins blog and the DropoutStore "2025 Pin of the Month Bundle" as an inline source.

Enamel pins. That's the level of trust you should have when LLMs pretend to be citing a source.

Did I say not to check the sources?

Or is that something you made up?

Ah so irrelevant / invalid sources are OK...

Only the first couple of time derivatives matter. The models are better than they were. Are you?

The LLMs I use all supply references.

Indeed! Sometimes even more than actually exist!

I don't think LLMs can be faulted on their enthusiasm for supplying references.

Yup, there's a wonderful, presumably LLM generated, response to somebody explaining how trademark law actually works, the LLM response insists that explanation was all wrong and cites several US law cases. Most of the cases don't exist, the rest aren't about trademark law or anywhere close. But the LLM isn't supposed to say truths, it's a stochastic parrot, it makes what looks most plausible as a response. "Five" is a pretty plausible response to "What is two plus three?" but that's not because it added 2 + 3 = 5

"Five" is not merely "plausible". It is the uniquely correct answer, and it is what the model produces because the training corpus overwhelmingly associates "2 + 3" with "5" in truthful contexts.

And the stochastic parrot framing has a real problem here: if the mechanism reliably produces correct outputs for a class of problems, dismissing it as "just plausibility" rather than computation becomes a philosophical stance rather than a technical critique. The model learned patterns that encode the mathematical relationship. Whether you call that "understanding" or "statistical correlation" is a definitional argument, not an empirical one.

The legal citation example sounds about right. It is a genuine failure mode. But arithmetic is precisely where LLMs tend to succeed (at small scales) because there is no ambiguity in the training signal.

It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.

But we now live in a world where people agree that ideology should be able to change facts.

> or the impact of certain wars

Exactly, like China wanting to completely censor anything regarding the Tiananmen Square protests.

> for example questioning homosexuality

I don't know what you have to question about this.

>If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.

All the LLM I've tested have a strong tendency to increase your echo chamber and not try to change your opinion on something.

>This is why you need to use different sources.

Only if deep down, you're ready to change your POV on something, otherwise you're just wasting time and ragebaiting yourself. Although I admit, it can still be entertaining to read some news to discover how they're able to twist reality.

For the last part I agree with you, the LLMs tend to say what you like to hear. The echo chamber problem also exists, pushing them to say pros and cons is not perfect, but helps to make an opinion (and also "unaligned" models).

Facts are very skewed by the environment: in the case you push too much in one direction that is too controversial or because the politicians disagree too much with you; there can be plenty of negative consequences:

- your website gets blocked, or you get publicly under pressure, or you lose donations, you lose grants, your payment providers blocks you, you lose audience, you can get a fine, you can go to jail, etc.

Many different options.

There is asymmetry here:

    We disagree, you have one opinion, what happens if both of us fight for 10 months, 24/7 debating "what is the truth ?" on that topic.

    - You have that energy and time (because it's your own page, or your mission where you are paid by your company, or because this topic is personally important to you, etc)

    - I don't have time or that topic is not *that* important for me.

    - Consequence: Your truth is going to win.

Sources are naturally going to be curated to support your view. At the end, the path of least resistance is to go with the flow.

The tricky part: there are also truths that cannot be sourced properly, but are still facts (ex: famous SV men still offering founders today investment against sex). Add on top of that, legal concerns, and it becomes a very difficult environment to navigate. Even further, it's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has.

> It's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has.

You appear to be using unusual definitions of "fact" and "truth", more akin to "assertions" and "vibe". I'll stick with the traditional definitions.

An example of (either fabricated, or just very convenient) facts:

[1] https://patriotpolling.com/our-polls/f/greenland-supports-jo...

    According to an American poll that surveyed 416 people residing across Greenland on their support for joining the United States.
    57.3% wants to join the US.

[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/greenland-poll-mute-egede-do...

    According to a Danish poll (conducted through web interviews) among 497 selected citizens in Greenland.
    85% do not want to join the US.

What is the actual truth ? Who knows.

You know that both can be true right ?

If I ask 10 people what they think of something and 60% says "no" and if I ask another 10 people and 90% says "yes" there's no relation between the 60% and the 90%, like at all.

Or as Homer said it "Anybody can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 40% of people know that."

I like what you said about the quote :)

My favorite is: "Numbers are fragile creatures, and if you can torture them enough, you can make them say whatever you want"

You're confusing data with facts.

A "fabricated fact" (or "alternative fact" if you prefer) is an oxymoron. Actual truth, as opposed to a vibe or what people are basing their decisions on these days, is orthogonal to "the amount of energy, power and money that the person has." Deriving or identifying actual facts and truth is hard (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method) and always subject to change based on new data, so lots of people don't do it -- it's much easier to just make shit up and confirms biases.

> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.

Not just because you must edit with facts. If your opposition outnumbers you and/or they have more energy to spend than you, they can grind you down with bad-faith arguments and questions for clarification.

The way this goes is that they edit an article to insert their POV. You edit/revert it. They open a talk page discussion about the subject. Suppose their edit is "marine animals are generally considered cute throughout the world" with a reference to a paper by an organization in favor of seals. You revert it by saying this is NPOV. They open a talk page question asking where the organization has been declared to be partisan. Suppose you do research and find some such third-party statement that "the Foundation for Animal Aesthetics is organized by proponents of marine animals". Then they ask how this third party is accurate, or whether "organized by proponents" necessarily implies that they're biased.

This can go on more or less forever until someone gives up. The attack even has a name on Wikipedia itself: "civil POV pushing". It works because few Wikipedia admins are subject matter experts, so they police behavior (conduct) more than they police subject accuracy.

Civil POV pushers can thus keep their surface conduct unobjectionable while waiting for the one they are actioning against to either give up or to get angry enough to make a heated moment's conduct violation. It's essentially the wiki version of sealioning.

In short, a thousand "but is really two plus two equal to four?" will overcome a single "You bastard, it is four and you're deliberately trolling me", because the latter is a personal insult.

> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.

Wikipedia is ideological. Even when the articles stick to the facts (which they often don't), editors will selectively omit inconvenient (but factually true) information to push their ideology.

As a recent, first-hand example of this, witness the highly ideologically motivated Wikipedia editors actively suppressing discussion of Hasan Piker's dog abuse/shock collar scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Hasan_Piker&...

There are many examples of edit wars between people fighting political battles, but I don’t think your link is one of them. I think how he treated his dog was cruel and I believe how he responded by lying and gaslighting his audience was disgusting, but that doesn’t mean it belongs on Wikipedia. In your link I don’t see Hasan white knights protecting their master from bad publicity, I see Hasan haters trying to bludgeon the change into the article by ignoring any objection and just reverting edits. It was frustrating to read people bringing up the same Forbes article and not reading the reason why it wasn’t suitable. Again, I dislike Hasan in general and especially for this, but if this was so important then why hasn’t any major news outlet written about it? You may disagree about what does and doesn’t belong on Wikipedia, and I have my own objections, but I truly don’t believe the rules were designed by a left leaning cabal to make their favorite Twitch streamer avoid egg on their face.

I appreciate your reasoned comment and think that it's thoughtful, but I respectfully disagree with some of your claims.

> In your link I don’t see Hasan white knights protecting their master from bad publicity

Yes, because it's not overt. Nobody says that when they're doing it. What's happening is claiming that the story is not notable so it can be removed because it's bad publicity for him:

> This is a nothing story and not encyclopedic.

> it seems to be "drama" amongst the terminally online

Then it turns out that it's notable because some sources are reporting it, but the editors make every effort to discount all of those sources:

> The Australian is noted as a center-right newssheet. I think there has been no rfc on it, but it seems an opinionated source.

> WP:NEWSWEEK has been noted to have had some quality decline according to RSP.

> WP:DEXERTO states not to use it for BLP and that its very tabloidy.

> WP:DAILYDOT also states its highly biased and opinionated. It seems rather tabloidy as well.

> See WP:TIMESOFINDIA but its not reliable enough for this

...and this is used as a reason to not even put a single-paragraph summary at the end of his article, despite the fact that the event is extremely notable as part of his career, and is exactly the information that someone reading the Wikipedia page would want to know.

> I see Hasan haters trying to bludgeon the change into the article by ignoring any objection and just reverting edits.

Yes, I see some of those people too. But, in response, the editors are reverting the changes and locking out the topic. An impartial editor concerned about the truth and curating a useful encyclopedia would not do that - they'd create new changes to remove specifically only the offending unsourced material and rewrite sourced material to be neutral.

> if this was so important then why hasn’t any major news outlet written about it

Along with the other sources listed in the talk page that the editors did their best to discount, The Guardian wrote about it - that certainly counts as a "major news outlet".

Nobody wants a ton of drama on Wikipedia, but this clearly surpasses the threshold of "drama" given that (1) it's still being discussed months afterwards (2) it has transcended the cultural circles around Hasan (which is the main metric for "drama") and (3) it's received reporting from many news outlets, including large and reliable ones like The Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/11/i-love-when-...

I want to make sure I understand -- In The Guardian article you linked, the author is making no claim about what happened to Kaya, he is only giving Hasan's statement about the incident. The claim presented in the article essentially boils down to: Kaya yelped while Hasan was reaching for something unrelated and that it's a "conspiracy theory" to think that Hasan uses a shock collar as he claims he doesn't. You're saying you're in favor of the Wikipedia article being updated to say this?

> This is why you need to use different sources.

This knife cuts both ways.

> Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.

What? If Bomis was a porn company then Reddit is a porn company.

Edit: I take it back. It looks like Bomis was more directly pushing soft core porn than I realized.

You make your slant against Wikipedia immediately obvious by attempting to smear it. You lazily link it with porn, but you're not making an actual point.

It's more to show that it doesn't matter much in the end where the project comes from, but rather where the project is going

> Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.

Thinking this is relevant is a very revealing position. It shines some very strong light on your ideological biases and, yes, your agenda, which I feel certain you will feel obligated to deny as a defensive measure. You are showing your hand in ways I don't think you realize.

It gave me an idea, a tool to analyze history of Hackernews user comments and determine what they are up to, what ideas they are pushing, etc. Would be cool and horrible at the same time (so if anyone wants to be on the first page of HN and has a couple of LLM credits somewhere)

looks like interviewer asks question not in a good faith

It is a fair question, IMO. His reaction was childish.

After watching this I kind of disagree. Wales said he didn’t care multiple times. Calling it the “dumbest question” is childish, yes. Walking out of an interview that was going nowhere is not childish.

I personally think writing Sanger out of Wikipedia history (as in this 25 year celebration montage thing) is quite lame. But I also think pressing Wales on this when he says “you can say whatever you want” is also quite lame. No one is obligated to sit with an interviewer while the interviewer tries to pick a fight.

You missed the part where Wales called a fact an "opinion". Wales could have said "I don't dispute the facts of that case. I see myself as the founder, but I won't argue against other interpretations. Lets move past it." Instead he immediately became defensive, even angry.

The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)

I don't see this as a political victim issue: I can see Sanger as an asshole while also seeing Wales as weak.

> You missed the part where Wales called a fact an "opinion".

Has Wales actually disputed the objective facts of the matter?

I did not take his comment to mean “it’s an opinion whether Sanger worked on Wikipedia from the beginning” but “it’s an opinion whether that qualifies him as a cofounder”.

> Wales could have said "I don't dispute the facts of that case. I see myself as the founder, but I won't argue against other interpretations. Lets move past it."

That is essentially what he said. He called himself the founder, then when the interviewer probed, said it’s a dumb question, then said he doesn’t care, then said the interviewer can frame it however he wants, then said again that he doesn’t care.

He said what you think he should’ve said. He just didn’t use your exact words.

> The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)

What “basic facts” did he press on? I heard no facts or questions about facts. He used the word “facts” while pressing Wales specifically about calling himself the founder.

There's context. Hank Green talked about it in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA, but in short, paraphrasing, and adding my own thoughts:

Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger has right-wing views and a habit of accusing any article as biased that doesn't praise Trump and fundamentalist Christian values, and takes these as proof that Wikipedia has a left lean.

The interview Wales walked out of was for his book tour. I imagine it's the umpteenth interview that week with the same question asked for the same transparently bad-faith reasons, trying to bend the interview away from his book and into right-wing conspiracy theory land.

Ok, but Tilo Jung is the absolute opposite of right wing

yes, but question can be done in different ways. and tilo jung always at least, not cared, if his questions are offensive... or trying to up the interviewed person

a group of people seems to think, that journalists should trip up people, like in interrogations, instead of being hard in the topic but nice in the tone.

Yeah, that sentiment surely exist that PR and journalism is not the same. Some would even argue that journalism should try to find facts and that being particularly pleasant and nice with doing so is secondary to the goal of fact finding, it’s not PR after all. One could even go as far as to speculate that a journalist being “nice” is not genuine but just a method to gain information. I know I am biased here as this is how I want it to be.

The case if Tilo is quite specific, his interview style uses methods that are effective and uncommon and in part extremely unpleasant, but super effective in making people a accidentally confess to him whilst forgetting all their media training.

> Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder

Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers. I can't imagine an interview not addressing a question that is so pertinent to Wales' notoriety. They literally cannot properly introduce him without confronting it! To say those interviewers are acting in "transparently bad-faith" comes across to me as plainly biased.

Sanger's politics don't change this, either. It might be the case that you have to concede on this to people you politically disagree with.

> Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers.

I went down the rabbit hole on this a while back and came away with the impression that it's complicated. And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words. Should Wales be referred to as "a founder", "co-founder", or "one of the founders"? It's not as if he's titling himself "sole founder". And Sanger is still list on his Wiki page and the Wikipedia pages as a Founder.

It should also be noted that Sanger was hired by Wales to manage Nupedia, and that Wikipedia was created as a side-project of Nupedia for the purpose to generating content for Nupedia. Does the fact that Sanger was an employee of Wales, and that Wikipedia only exists because Sanger was tasked with generating content for Nupedia impact his status as a founder? Would Sanger or Wales have gone on to create a wiki without the other?

Can Steve Jobs claim to be the creator of the iPhone since he was CEO at the time it was created at Apple?

At the end of the day Sanger was present at the ground breaking of Wikipedia but was laid off and stopped participating in the project entirely after a year. He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation. He did however try to sabotage or subvert the project 5 years later when it was clear that it was a success. Interestingly he tried to fork it to a project that had strong editorial oversight from experts like Nupedia which flies in the face of the ethos of Wikipedia.

> And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words.

A big piece of this is that “founder” is actually a very unusual title to use here. Normally someone would “create a product” and “found a company”. Wikipedia is not a company. It’s not even the name of the foundation. It’s a product.

It’s kind of like Steve Jobs saying he founded the iPhone.

> He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation.

Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.

> Wikipedia is not a company. It’s not even the name of the foundation. It’s a product.

I'm inclined to agree with you but there are plenty of examples of founders of products: Matt Mullenweg, Dries Buytaert

> Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.

I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.

The core arguments are "you shouldn't claim to be founder of a product" and "claiming to be founder implies sole founder". This is why I say it breaks down to mincing words.

> I'm inclined to agree with you but there are plenty of examples of founders of products: Matt Mullenweg, Dries Buytaert

Fair, but I do think the distinction between the company and the product is relevant. Wales’s claim to be the sole founder of Wikipedia relies specifically on muddying these two notions.

My recollection is that Wales has claimed that Sanger doesn’t qualify as a founder because he was an employee. OK, except Wikipedia is not an employer. If Jimmy Wales qualifies as the founder of Wikipedia specifically because of his ownership in the company that initially funded it, then the other founders of Bomis would seem to also be Wikipedia cofounders.

On the other hand, if being a founder of Wikipedia actually means being instrumental in the creation of the product, then Sanger seems clearly a founder.

Mixing and matching across two different definitions to uniquely identify Wales alone seems very self-serving and inconsistent.

To be clear, I’m not really disputing anything you said here. Just kind of griping about Wales’s self serving definition of founder.

> I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.

I don’t know if anyone has claimed Wales should not be considered a cofounder. I think the general question is specifically whether he is the only founder. In this interview, he introduced himself as “the” founder.

> I don’t know if anyone has claimed Wales should not be considered a cofounder. I think the general question is specifically whether he is the only founder. In this interview, he introduced himself as “the” founder.

I don't think that he was claiming to be sole-founder and I don't think claiming to be founder implies you're the sole founder. The choice of "the" over "a" though does have some implication, and his intentional choice to use "the" might have been to avoid broaching the subject of Sanger. It's clearly a touchy subject for him.

And at the same time if Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were introduced as the founders of their respective companies I personally wouldn't think much of it.

At the end of the day, the Wikipeida pages on Wikipedia and Sanger credit Sanger appropriately so the it's not as if Wales is exerting his will to erase Sanger or his contribution. He just gets pissy when you bring it up.

In the specific case, this is a long running thing. Historically Wales has in fact dismissed Sanger as being a founder and presented himself as the sole founder. That’s why the interviewer poked at this immediately. It’s also why Wales got so annoyed, because he’s had probably this exact same conversation a million times and didn’t want to do it again.

If Bill Gates called himself “the founder” of Microsoft, people would probably dismiss it as a slip of the tongue. For Wales, I don’t think it was a slip of the tongue at all. It’s an intentional choice. I don’t agree with his interpretation, but I also don’t think he’s obligated to rehash the topic in every single interview.

Wales actually covers this at length in his book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Rules_of_Trust

He himself admits it's a complicated situation, and argues both his own and Sanger's position.

Combined with the context provided by all the parent comments here, it's quite difficult to argue good faith given the interview was also specifically on the book tour. There are many different and actually productive ways the interview could have talked about the conflict between Wales and Sanger.

The inability of wealthy people to take responsibility for themselves and instead blame their own bad behavior on the mere existence of Trump is getting exceptionally thin.

Credit your co-founders. Even if you don't agree with them anymore. There's no excuse not to.

If you've been asked the question a lot then you should be _very good_ at answering it by now.

Wow, thanks for the video actually. For a long time I felt he was complete jerk but I felt it was maybe biased propaganda. The mere fact he couldn't answer a basic question and explain for all those who don't know, but rather stormed out like a 4 year old child, only proves what I felt about him prior.

Your comment is a great example of someone deciding on a conclusion first, then backfilling a justification using minimal evidence—in this case, a single data point—to validate an existing suspicion or bias. With that standard, you can make virtually any public or semi-public figure look bad if you’re willing to cherry-pick a small enough slice of information.

> cherry-pick a small enough slice of information

[...] For a long time [...]

Without context, it looks like the interviewer was a jerk and ambushed him.

I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.)

---

That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the right" to walk off; or at least say something like "I can't tell the story accurately, so please move on to a different question."

The interview started with the most mundane question "Who are you?", and the very first sentence of Wales is either a lie or misleading. The journalists asks for clarification (thats a journalists job, btw), and in his second sentence of the interview Wales insults the journalist. I'm pretty sure who is the jerk here.

It also was Wales who bought up the topic, not the journalist. If he considers it a stupid topic he does not want to talk about, why is it the very first thing he talks about?

"So, who are you?" "Stupid question."

What an interview! I had never seen this clip before, it's really something. Facts and context are important for sure, but as someone who isn't clued in on the Sanger drama, Wales could not possibly have made himself look worse. And in under a minute!

As you said, the interviewer is in the right, carrying out the job of interviewing, by pushing Wales as he did. To call him a "jerk" is silly, I think.

Sanger was originally hired to edit Nupedia, a web encyclopedia project with a strict peer review process, and only worked for Wales for about a year. Wikipedia was started as a side project (with Sanger contributing to the concept and some early organizing), but Wikipedia quickly became much more successful while Nupedia basically never got off the ground. My impression is that Sanger wanted to impose his own vision on Wikipedia, but couldn't because the community of volunteer editors disagreed, and when Wales stopped paying him as a full time Nupedia editor (Wales's company was tight on cash at that time), he stopped any involvement. This was long before most of the actual work of Wikipedia happened, and that should have been the end of the story.

But ever since, Sanger has been trash talking Wikipedia as a project and community ("broken beyond repair") and trying to undermine it. A few years later he started a competing project (which was predictably a total failure). For two decades he has been promoting himself as "cofounder of Wikipedia". Interviewer after interviewer asks the same lazy questions about the subject, without ever adding any new insight. (You can see that Sanger's ghost is chasing Wikipedia even into this discussion.)

It's beating a dead horse, and entirely off the topic of what the interview was supposed to be about. Answering the question clearly and accurately takes a lot of time and finesse, which is wasted on the interviewer and most of the audience. Wales clearly screwed up in that interview, but it's not hard to see where he's coming from, psychologically.

>It always come down to who put the long-term work in.

Exactly. Kudo to the wikimedia community!

> That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in.

So Wales can write Sanger out of the history of Wikipedia, despite evidence strongly showing that Sanger originated the idea, the name, the policies, and indeed that Sanger was the primary driving force for years. And everyone’s is supposed to accept this historical revision because who created it is a “silly topic”.

Is it also a silly topic when Wales claims credit? Or only when someone questions his assertion?

I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask "who had what idea".

Journalism can't be deferential to it's subjects. Jimmy is a CEO of a company with lots of money and tons of access to the media. If he can't successfully prepare himself for the obvious then I can't feel bad for him.

Agreed.

In fact, journalists should be less deferential to every CEO. Those should be treated with the highest degree of scrutiny.

I really hate gotcha questions like "who are you".

IMO Wales has been sitting on that chair for too long. He should retire.

It would also be better for Wikipedia to not have any "public face". I don't want fake-heroes; I want accurate, objective content.

I think he plays a good role as a lightning rod for all the MAGA morons to attack, rather than going after contributors. It's better that Musk has a tantrum at Jimmy rather than doxing some poor editor on X.

Sad that he has to play that role, but this is where we are at the moment.

Fair. Not sure if I agree or not, but an interesting perspective for sure. Would love to hear exactly why and how your comment is triggering people her..

Pffft hahaha. Looks like interviewer was inexperienced AND hit a touchy subject. It's like trying to have a casual conversation about dating with someone who's secretly gay.

It’s the style of the interviewer. It works really well for Tilo in many cases at least. He is good as confusing and making you so uncomfortable that loos your media training. He does things that are questionable in normal life but meant more great fact finding. As we see, this does not always work. He has more or less made a career of bing a bit to close and a bit too unpleasant to the people who agree tho be interviewed.

What context may also have been lost is that the interview format is self described as somewhat naive and simple. I think the “who are you” question is his standard opening move. The interview series literally advertises to be for the “disinterested” sure you can hate it but you cannot feel tricked…

I'd say his lack of acknowledgment of Larry Sanger is actually quite useful, as it is a perfect and irrefutable example that Wikipedia has no qualms with omitting information and twisting the truth to serve a narrative.

Wikimedia, maybe, but Wikipedia itself acknowledges it in the lead paragraph:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

> Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales

> Most notably, he co-founded Wikipedia

Wikipedia shows integrity even when its co-founder does not:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales#Co-founder_status_...

> In late 2005, Wales edited his biographical entry on the English Wikipedia. Writer Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that in his edits to the page, Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia.[53][54] Sanger commented that "having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because, in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out."[20][55] Wales was also observed to have modified references to Bomis in a way that was characterized as downplaying the sexual nature of some of his former company's products.[16][20] Though Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content,[20] he apologized for editing his biography, a practice generally discouraged on Wikipedia.[20][55]

Jimmy Wales isn't Wikimedia. He's the co-founder of Wikipedia, and an honorary board member. He doesn't serve any official capacity.

I'm not saying Jimmy Wales is Wikimedia.

This promotional website is created by the Wikimedia Foundation (it says so in the About page), and "has no qualms with omitting information" (GGP's claim), as it fails to mention that Jimmy Wales is co-founder of Wikipedia alongside Larry Sanger. By contrast, Wikipedia does not omit this fact.

In order to find this useful you would have to believe that Jimmy Wales writes the articles on Wikipedia which is a ridiculous notion.

Rich people don't write articles on Wikipedia. They pay other people to do so. Some of the articles on billionaires read like hagiographies.

Wikipedia is extremely biased and has a lot of deliberate misinformation, so I wouldn't trust it for anything except as a basic starting point for information gathering alongside a web search. Wikipedia's founder itself has denounced it for its bias.

Except Larry Sanger still has a Wikipedia page[1], that even starts so:

> Lawrence Mark Sanger (/ˈsæŋər/; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia

It's actually the greatest testament to Wikipedia's neutrality. Even its founder is completely powerless to control it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

>He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.

I don't want to defend Jimbo Wales (he's very touchy about the subject), but to be honest, even if he's a founder, Larry Sanger didn't contribute much to what Wikipedia today is.

Larry Singer was essentially running Wikipedia in the early days though, until he was laid off, so in some sense we could think of him as a co-founder who was ousted. It's true that he didn't contribute much (as an unpaid volunteer) after that though.

If someone builds a free knowledge-repository platform and makes it available for worldwide use, and if that platform takes off to become commonly used globally, then I think some credit is due to such founder and innovator.

> Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps?

Who left extremely early on in the project, went to create a poorly conceived and failed competitor, then spent the next 23ish years shitting on Wikipedia? Why does he deserve any credit?

Because he co-founded it, duh. Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.

This website purports to tell us how Wikipedia came to be, 25 years ago. Why not tell it honestly?

> Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.

I think if you asked anyone in that situation, they probably wouldn't call them their dad, so yeah, this is indeed a good example.

Larry Sanger is effectively an abusive parent who did their best to try to ensure Wikipedia didn't survive. Him being there for the birth doesn't mean much.

Indeed, but no matter how much you don't want your dad to be your dad, he is your dad, which was also my point.

Without Sanger, Wikipedia:

- wouldn't be called "Wikipedia"

- wouldn't be editable without first opening an account

- wouldn't have NPOV as a fundamental policy

In short, it wouldn't be Wikipedia.

The community he incubated grew and took Wikipedia onwards to what it is today, even if he disagrees with that direction and plugs his own massively less popular encyclopedia.

> no matter how much you don't want your dad to be your dad, he is your dad

Someone biologically being your parent, doesn't mean you're required to call them your dad.

The claims around whether these things would be true or not are questionable. We don't know whether these things were solely his decision or not, or if others were involved in the process. We don't know that his early involvement lead to the success of the project or not.

I added HTTPS infrastructure to wikimedia foundation sites. Even if I weren't there, that would have eventually happened, though potentially much later. I moved wikimedia from svn to git, for development, and maybe that never would have happened and some other source control system would have been used, but would that have led to failure of the project? Almost certainly not.

You're giving this person far too much credit, especially as they've spent decades trying to destroy something they "created".

I think Wikipedia is the only place where an early employee who left relatively quickly would be considered a "co-founder". If this was a tech company i dont think Larry would be considered a co-founder.

I think the thing is a soar subject because Wikipedia essentially rejected all of Sangar's ideas, but he's still kind of riding on its coattails.

A founder only has to be there for the beginning. "Early employee" and "left relatively quickly" would not disqualify him.

I know little about Sanger but he wouldn't be the first person to have been written out. Elon Musk's partner in early PayPal suffered that fate.

Wikipedia itself says Larry Sanger "co-founded" Wikipedia, but I don't quite understand why. If you get into the details, he was Wales' employee at the time, and made initial version of Wikipedia while being paid as such. So I'm tentatively with Wales on that ATM.

Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their achievements as your own.

If Wales had anyone else, or had gone it alone, it's unlikely Wikipedia would be what it is today.

> Employing someone doesn't let you pass off their achievements as your own.

Doesn't it? That's basically how tech companies work. You can tell he's written an initial version of Wikipedia, but founder is emphatically not an employee.

That's not how fame and credit for some novel thing is shared. The minds of two people were vital to its success, and we don't fold that into one because of business structure.

Please tell the founders of various companies I've developed novel things for that my name should be at the top with theirs :p

"founder" is a weasel word that doesn't belong on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

Does the OP site give anyone credit for anything, except crediting Jimmy Wales and "volunteers"?

A monument to vanity.

If you're looking for something interesting, check out https://www.citizendium.com

It's his newer baby. Clearly it's a clone of Wikipedia, without the content of course. If Wikipedia ever goes wrong, it's nice to know that we have an alternative.

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