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> Wikimedia Discussion > General Discussion > The Jimbo Phenomenon
cyofee
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Wikileaks is becoming one of its own valid stories

Wikileaks is desperately attempting to become a story. By doing so, they're detracting attention from the actual important stories that they run. What are we debating here: the mass murder of innocent civilians, or Wikileaks?
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They're harassed at the international level

No. No, they are not. You've bought Assange's story. There is no evidence, other than his assertions, that he is being "harassed" at any level, let alone the international. Remember when he claimed his passport had been "seized", and it turned out to be that all that happened was that it had been pointed out to him that it was due to expire?

He's been threatening to release these videos and documents for months now, in what has become a rather pathetic attempt to get some attention from the Big Bad US. That shows that he's more interested in becoming a cause célèbre than in actually doing what he set out to do: publish and damn their eyes.

The man has or had good intentions, but now he's pulling a Jimbo Wales, and getting delusions that he's bigger than his creation, when he needs to be as anonymous as his sources.


From http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1694236&cid=32654062

I like how Jimbo is an example of attention whoring coming from the founder of a nonprofit. It looks like WR's finally influencing opinions.
thekohser
That's excellent news. Let us continue this form of usage!
Somey
Interesting - the opposing view seems to be that Assange (i.e., Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks) is trying to heighten his public profile in order to protect himself from (presumably US) government agents who want to "harass" him or possibly kill him. The reasoning is that intelligence agencies are less likely to go after public figures due to the greater likelihood of media attention, but it's perfectly reasonable IMO to believe that Assange is actually doing both things (protecting himself and promoting himself) at once. Of course, most of the Slashdot posters seem to think it has to be one or the other exclusively, but that's the interwebs for you.

Anyway, compare this with Jimbo's practical rationale for increasing his own public profile, which is to help promote Wikia, Inc. By promoting Wikia he promotes himself, almost by definition. Moreover, it's unlikely that Jimbo had "good intentions" at the outset when he and Larry Sanger started Wikipedia, or at least not the currently stated good intentions. Rather they were simply trying to stay ahead of the competition in the link-farming business, which is what Bomis was doing. (The breakthrough was when they hit on the idea of building an encyclopedia to use as a link-farm, which later became a publicly-editable encyclopedia-slash-link-farm, which rather quickly became a publicly-editable encyclopedia that no longer needed to link-farm because it was a link destination in itself.)

In both cases there's a fair amount of historical revisionism going on about these guys. Personally, I don't usually blame people for wanting to promote themselves as long as they're reasonably honest about it, but it seems clear enough that neither Assange nor Wales is particularly honest in that regard.
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