Proselytisation of the cult of Wikipedia has reached new heights. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, has joined a speaker's agency (amusingly, he's advertised just above Karl Rove). Note that he keeps all fees, which can exceed $50,000 (£27,000), maintaining that such engagements "are inviting me in my personal capacity" (bit.ly/seth8).

His pitch (bit.ly/seth9) starts: "Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge ... To create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language - That's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal."

But history tells a different story, one extensively entangled with commercial goals and ad-supported websites. An old "Overview" page (bit.ly/seth10) at Wikipedia states: "Originally all of Wikipedia was at the .com address. Bomis, the company owned by Wikipedia patron Jimbo Wales, hoped to make Wikipedia profitable, or at least cover the costs of operation, so it was at least theoretically a commercial operation. At one point, Jimbo was planning on placing unobtrusive advertisements on Wikipedia, but that plan has since been completely abandoned."

In the early days, nobody foresaw how successful Wikipedia would become. The structural turning point seems have been the 2002 departure of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger (bit.ly/seth11). With costs reduced, Wales wrote: "All plans to put advertising of any kind on the wikipedia is called off for now. We will move forward with plans for a nonprofit foundation ..." (bit.ly/seth12). Basically, it was a small side project which then became popular far beyond imagining - primarily, I believe, as a result of a quirk in Google's search ranking algorithm, a little-discussed factor.

Nowadays, Wales often presents Wikipedia as a precursor or prototype for his venture capital-backed startup company, Wikia Inc. Note that the for-profit Wikia has no significant financial connection to Wikipedia's owner, the nonprofit Wikipedia Foundation. However, Wikia derives enormous intangible benefit from the name recognition and mental associations of Wikipedia.

Wikia is sometimes summarised with the slogan "Wikipedia is the Encyclopedia. Wikia is the rest of the library." But libraries are not dedicated to making profits by selling advertising on every page of their books while having authors write the books for free (How will Wikia cope when the workers all quit the plantation?, July 31, bit.ly/seth13).

A recent article (bit.ly/seth14) in Trader Monthly Magazine provides a particularly blunt business analysis, one that contrasts strikingly with the evangelist glurge often found in press articles. It describes Wales's previous failed entrepreneurial ventures, leading to "... his effort to take the success - and, indeed, the underlying philosophy - of Wikipedia, and commercialise the hell out of it".

It's informative to observe how long Wales has been pursuing a strategy of selling advertising around other people's work. Some observers see a journalistic cheap irony in Jimmy Wales being philosophically an Objectivist (the fanatically capitalist intellectualism created by Ayn Rand). Supposedly this is in contradiction with the altruism that motivates massive amounts of free labour.

In fact, Wales speaks a language of corporate collectivism that would not be out of place in Rand's novels. Hyperbolically, it's where docile workers express joy that wonderful capitalists have provided the means of production, enabling glorious collective enterprises such as a laissez-faire market. This sounds strange to people who don't know about esoteric business-worshipping ideologies, and so mistakenly assume that phrases like "collective action" automatically indicate communism. Just think of a viewpoint which regards a powerless proletariat labouring to produce wealth for owners as being the highest social achievement, and the connections should be clearer.

Beware corporate executives posing as social visionaries. The hype may be about the fulfillment of human potential, but the reality is the exploitation of digital sharecropping.

sethf.com/infothought/blog