<CPOV> fork interview

[nathaniel tkacz]

thanks for the kind words joseph! you might remember me snooping around some
of the wikipedia lists a few weeks back trying to contact edgar. once i did,
i realised he had a wealth of material to share and i decided on the
interview.

edgar told me that he has been approached several times a year since 2002,
but has never shared his story because the people contacting him were either
mainstream journalists or people from wikimedia and he wasn't convinced they
would let him tell his version of the story.

the arguing between sanger and wales about the history of ads is fast
becoming ridiculous! the thing is, nobody would care if wales just said
"sure, in the early days i was considering some version of ads. i thought it
was a good way to ensure the project could grow and sustain itself. turns
out it wasn't needed and that's great!"

best

Nate Tkacz

School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne

Twitter: http://twitter.com/__nate__

Research Page: http://nathanieltkacz.net

Current project: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/about-2/


On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 3:40 AM, Joseph Reagle <joseph.2008 at reagle.org>wrote:

> I left a comment about how much I appreciated the interview on the CPOV
> blog, but it never showed, but I'm glad to see it got a bit more attention
> and response at Wired.
>
> As the situation between Wales/Sanger becomes ever more acrimonious and
> muddied the perspectives of others around at that time are ever more
> important. I'm guilty for focusing mostly on Wales and Sanger in my book --
> and only allude to this issue via a reference to Kovitz in a footnote [1] --
> because of my focus on Wikipedia as part of a long pursued "universal
> encyclopedia". However, I am greatly looking forward to historians -- and
> even biographers -- delving into this in time. (I'm confident this will
> happen, but perhaps it will take decades.)
>
>
> [1]: The latest “co-founding” controversy was prompted by an interview with
> Jimmy Wales when he agreed with an interviewer's question that Sanger's
> claims were shaky because “he basically just put himself down as co-founder”
> on early press releases, in \cite{JohnsWales2009iww}. This prompted an “open
> letter” from \cite{Sanger2009olj}. Interestingly, the most credible and
> detailed account of the birth of the Wikipedia idea differs from both Wales’
> and Sanger’s recollections, see \cite{Kovitz2009ub}.
>
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