LOS ANGELES—It looks like Glenn Greenwald is not the only “public figure” whose past engagement with adult entertainment is being dragged out in exposé style by the mainstream media. The New York Times magazine has published a long essay on Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales (pictured) that includes an examination of his early involvement with soft porn, and Business Insider then extricated only the porn parts for its own article titled, “Wikipedia Was Started With Revenue From Soft-Core Porn.”
In the Times piece, writer Amy Chozick mentions porn in the context of a search engine called Bomis, which Wales co-founded, and which, she reports, “came with a ‘Bomis Babe Report,’ a blog with photos of scantily clad celebrities and porn stars.”
Though she doesn’t investigate what percentage of Bomis’ revenue was derived from what she calls porn, she does include an objection by Wales in 2005 to an entry on his Wikipedia page alleging that Bomis peddled porn.
“The mature audience [NOT pornography] portion of the business is significantly less than 10 percent of total revenues,” Wales corrected.
“Porn or not,” continues Chozick, “Bomis’s profits financed Wales’s side project, Nupedia, an online encyclopedia with peer-reviewed entries written by experts and academics that served as the predecessor to Wikipedia.”
A few paragraphs later, during a section describing changes Wales went through in 2004-5 both personally and professionally—including the “shrewd branding transformation” of Wikipedia into a place where, as he put it at the time, “every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge”—Chozick includes a gratuitously mean critique of Wales by a technology writer named Andrew Keen, who had “clashed with Wales” in the past, and who described Wales to Chozick as “a soft-porn guy who stumbled on to this thing.”
That is the full extent of the mention of “porn” in the New York Times piece, but from it Business Insider has crafted its own mean-spirited little essay by Kyle Russell that begins by posing and then answering a question people supposedly would be interested in: “Here's something few people probably know about Wikipedia: It was started with money from Jimmy Wales' previous site which relied in part on soft corn porn to generate revenue.” (That's right, the article, which was first posted today at about 11:30 am, still has the uncorrected description, "soft corn porn," which frankly sounds lind of yummy.)
Typo aside, the real question is: why does Business Insider think anyone cares about this now? Luckily, a commenter has answered that one already with the adroit observation, “If you claimed that a porn site was started with revenue from Wikipedia, THEN you might have a story.”
Brilliant.
Photo: Jimmy Wales at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Awards Show, 2011, courtesy of Thomas Entzeroth (photographer) on behalf of Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.
