Motivation behind creating Wikipedia
business.in.com
Especially the answer to the question "Tell us about something deeply personal that helped you shape your world view, that has made Wikipedia what it is."
business.in.com
Strange because I've created sites, and I know that the reasons to carry on doing something morphs over time but that when asked it's easy to apply things that affect us now to our actions in the past.
That is, I suspect that we are constantly re-writing our own view of history based on personal experiences.
So I find them strange because the question is being asked now, rather than then. And that means that the success of the project, in this case Wikipedia, and it's resulting effect on the world (or however that should be phrased) has already happened. And out of that unforeseen and unpredicted effects have also happened. And that now, armed with the knowledge of the current effects it's always easy to declare that said effect was actually our intent.
The article is clearly touching. But I wonder whether it really was an epiphany moment that created the motivation to create Wikipedia or whether it's closer to what I suspect which is that it wasa small action that was the right thing at the right time, that has snow-balled into something vastly greater, and that now it's easy to re-interpret the original small action into being of greater meaning than it is.
Of course, I also suspect I'm just a cynic.
The main idea of Wikipedia, even its combative/collaborative style and its peculiar solution to the epistemological problem of getting reliable knowledge, was cooked up in a flash of inspiration, and then talked out over a single dinner. The main policy ideas did not take a whole lot longer to work out, and they were mostly developed by one person—a philosophy Ph.D. who had a thing about reliability and bias.
The majority of the work for a long time was the relentless political/marketing effort to attract people to the Wikipedia community and keep them agreed to the main social values that had been envisioned very early.
Hrrmph. I don't want to take anything away from Wales, since his contributions are indeed extraordinary: starting (and funding) Nupedia, funding Wikipedia, managing it with just the right light touch, and continuing to spread the word and get funding. But he did not pioneer this way of putting content together.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BenKovitz#I.27m_not_one_of...
This question is very interesting. Would be great to hear answers from start-up founders here.