the Wikipedia Story

Where did wikipedia come from?

So I was wondering who actually cares about information sharing ... I for one do not care all that much about information sharing. 1. i don't want people to know what I know and 2. I don't care what you know.  But that was not what Jim Whales thinks and he made millions of dollars and started wikipedia ... so what does that make me ... stubborn?

His story:

He was inspired by the open source movement

I was looking at the growth of the free software movement and I was seeing how communities of programmers were coming together online to create software.  So it wasn’t so much about wanting the end result (the encyclopedia) to be different, although the end result is quite different, but more about realizing that were was a new model for collaboration going on online and that there would be a lot of cool stuff that should go along with that.

There wasn’t a business plan

The best businesses are not cooked up by MBA’s with reams of data and business plans.  That’s never been true.  The best businesses are meeting the needs of the customer in an innovative way. It really was more about seeing an opportunity and an idea and knowing it needs to be done, and that’s what I think really makes something work.

Good for him ... I'm impressed and I must say I use wikipedia ... my resoning, because dumb people are too lasy to post.  So the smart ones do it!!!

Thats it for me.