Wales: VC funding would have killed Wikipedia's community governance model
Jimmy Wales · Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales (2018) · Jan 27, 2020 · at 18:38
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, reflects on how the dot-com crash and an initial lack of capital forced Wikipedia to rely on community moderation.
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“And in fact, one of the reasons that Wikipedia became a huge success, I would say, ironically, is the lack of funding. Because if I had had the money, if I'd gone to Silicon Valley and convinced somebody to give me millions of dollars to start this, then your natural instinct, if you have any problem on the site, is to say, okay, well, we just need to hire some Moderators. And we're going to make decisions and we're going to have staff members who decide things. And instead we, there was no money. We couldn't hire anybody. So as a community working together, we had to find our own solutions. And so we had to say, you know, what are the software solutions we need to be able to control for vandalism? And then imagine we have a really, really tough editorial decision we have to make. How do we make those decisions? All of those things happened because there was no money to hire anyone because it would have been much easier to just hire people. And that would have actually prevented the rise of a more natural set of solutions.”
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