It's business time. It's business time.

Founder, Wikipedia.org
Co-Founder, Wikia.com

There goes the credibility of any future arguments that "founder" can also be used to mean a co-founder. Thanks Jimbo.

<fixed to say Wikia.com instead of Wiki.com - thanks Anthony>

As somebody said there:

WIN.

(I've edited your quote to change Wiki.com to Wikia.com.)

It's interesting how he chose to call himself Co-Founder of "Wikia.com" rather than "Wikia". It's obvious he did this intentionally to contrast it against "Founder" of "Wikipedia.org", since if he had chosen the normal terminology he'd have to call himself "Co-Founder" of "Wikimedia Foundation".

The man is even intellectually dishonest on his business cards.

A lot of people in the "Internet era", especially Marketing Types, like to use the domain names of an entity in preference to actual organization/company names (though in some cases they even incorporate the actual companies with the domain name as their name). I can't stand that myself, but it's so prevalent that it's not really possible to read any specific motive into any individual use of that sort.

In the case of Wikipedia, the only valid way to refer to it as a historical entity extending from 2001 to the present is as "Wikipedia" with no suffixes or organizational names attached, since the Wikimedia Foundation wasn't started until years later, and even "wikipedia.org" didn't become the address of Wikipedia until later than its founding (it was originally in "wikipedia.com" while owned by Bomis, and still often gets mistakenly referred to in this manner by ignorant journalists).

Wikipedia.org was bought the day after Wikipedia.com, and it was being used as an alias for the website by July of 2001 (see archive.org), before the founding of the Wikimedia Foundation. According to my notes (Wikipedia: The Timeline, which I have to double-check), the official switchover from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org took place in August 2002, still nearly a year before the founding of the Wikimedia Foundation.

I think it's clear that wikipedia.org is referring to the website, not the domain name, though.

A website, its domain name, and the company/organization which runs it are three different entities, though often muddled together carelessly. Yahoo started its life at akebono.stanford.edu as a student project (the hostname was the particular Stanford server it was running on, named after a Japanese sumo wrestler) before getting its own domain and company later.

I don't see the problem with referring to a website by its domain name. I realize the three entities are separate, but that doesn't mean the names are. Is "Wikipedia" even the name of the website? I thought you Wikipedians claimed that "Wikipedia" was the name of the encyclopedia.

How would you suggest phrasing "I read that on microsoft.com"?

And by the way, wikia.com was wikicities.com when it was "founded". Except, well, you wouldn't accept that phrasing. I should say "the website currently accessible using the domain name wikia.com was only accessible using the domain name wikicities.com when it first became accessible on the world wide web."

Yes, entities can keep multiplying, including the website itself, its content, its owner(s), its founder(s), its domain name(s), and so on, sometimes including lots of mergers, splits/forks, changes in ownership, changes in name (both the name of the site and of the domain it's in), and so on. The names might not even be logically consistent in one time and place, as in TV commercials singing a silly jingle promoting "FreeTripleScore.com" but showing on the screen a URL like "FreeTripleScore123.com" for tracking purposes.