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Comment by an_ko | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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