On The Media

Nice interview and story. I noticed a few mistakes in your info page. Your first link does not work and "but it appeared on Rohde’s Wikipedia page almost immediately". His name is misspelled.

Bob Garfield errs when he calls Jimmy Wales "founder" of Wikipedia. The reliable sources have amply demonstrated that Wales was in fact one of two basic "co-founders" of Wikipedia, with Dr. Larry Sanger having been the one to bring the wiki architecture to the encyclopedia project, he named "Wikipedia", and he labored for the first year of the project defining and supporting most of the key policy and process tenets of the project. Wales only later started re-framing or re-characterizing his own role as "founder", or even more ridiculously, as "sole founder". The evidence again amply demonstrates that Jimmy Wales is bluntly lying about his and Sanger's respective roles, and this is exactly the outcome that Wales wanted -- to have journalists like Bob Garfield inadvertently call him "founder", thus increasing Wales' speaking fee price tag. I notice that in the more prepared bumper at the end of the piece, Garfield corrects himself and calls Wales "co-founder".

This may seem like a small, petty thing. But, if you research more thoroughly into Wales' past 5 years, you'll find a repeated cycle of public and private deception and outright lying (Essjay fiasco, Rachel Marsden affair, secret mailing lists on Wikia, Inc. servers, etc.). Is that the quality of person the world deserves running the "sum of human knowledge" site?