Oh Wikipedia—that reminds me—in late 1990s before Wikipedia there was “Free Online Dictionary of Computing”. The main difference between two was that you needed to email the moderators to get your changes included. The results were even more extreme than OB vs LW.
FOLDOC was the basis of a number of entries I’ve worked on. I had no idea that it was participation based! I guess that explains why the entries were so scrawny...
When the FOLDOC maintainer saw Wikipedia, he promptly gave up and said “use my stuff, you’re already doing better”—this is why he released it under GFDL, so WIkipedia could just take it.
Wikipedia didn’t get hundreds of millions of visitors until after it got so big.
I know it’s hard to believe, but when we started in 2001, it was a very tiny very obscure website people were commonly making fun of, and we were excited with any coverage we could get (and getting omg slashdotted—that was like news of the month).
Oh Wikipedia—that reminds me—in late 1990s before Wikipedia there was “Free Online Dictionary of Computing”. The main difference between two was that you needed to email the moderators to get your changes included. The results were even more extreme than OB vs LW.
FOLDOC was the basis of a number of entries I’ve worked on. I had no idea that it was participation based! I guess that explains why the entries were so scrawny...
When the FOLDOC maintainer saw Wikipedia, he promptly gave up and said “use my stuff, you’re already doing better”—this is why he released it under GFDL, so WIkipedia could just take it.
Even after normalizing by the total number of visitors to FOLDOC and the total number of visitors to Wikipedia respectively?
Wikipedia didn’t get hundreds of millions of visitors until after it got so big.
I know it’s hard to believe, but when we started in 2001, it was a very tiny very obscure website people were commonly making fun of, and we were excited with any coverage we could get (and getting omg slashdotted—that was like news of the month).