Because he has an exceedingly tolerant employer. Wikia, the for-profit startup he created after realizing he'd never make a fortune from Wikipedia, is betting on Wikia Search, a "Google-killing search engine" Wales bragged about in sex chats with ex-lover Rachel Marsden. Wales has talked about moving from San Francisco to New York to be closer to the search project's team. The notion of Wikia Search is that, as with Wikipedia, volunteers can build a better search engine than Google's experts. The reality? According to a user who's been working on the project since 2006, nothing is getting done. His screed, sent to an internal Wikia mailing list:

Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:13:24
To:"Mailing list for Search Wikia" ,"Search Wiki" ,"Jimmy Wales" , jer ,dennis@igfoo.com
Subject: [Search-l] Sorry to do this but its coming, yes a rant :-(

Right, im afraid the time has come once again where i have been wondering to my self again, and i feel that things need to be said, so here they are.

*Whats happening with the project. AFAIK overall (and i know somethings have happened) but *very* little seems to have happened since the launch. Now i know that things are probably happening with the team, but any chance of actually telling the users about this, cos its not looking good from here atm.

Ive copied in the so called pillars of search

* Transparency - riiiiiiight :-(
* Community - hmmm contribute to stale projects?

* Quality - well....

* Privacy - hmm yes that seems to have been done to an extent ( by the community mind)

Ive been on the project since dec 2006, and so have been waiting along time for this to happen, so its not purely a case of i want everything to happen NOW, i just want it to look like SOMETHING will happen SOON.

*This brings me onto the next topic of where is the project going??? There has been practically no progress, and frankly i cant see much being done from my point. The launch has happened, many people were interested, contributed but have now left, because NOTHING has happened. so overall the net gain of launching the project?? bad press and a few (relative to the web) minis.

*Many things have been promised by various people, which havent happened. Most specifically this has come from a certain member of staff, one specifically, that has said that they will do many things, but even the most basic of tasks seem to have not happened. so Broken/missed promises. Well iirc (name here) said he would make sure that the about pages etc were created, hmm... (http://alpha.search.wikia.com/about.html in case you forgot where those were). This is a wikia project, any chance of getting ANY involvement/input/co-ordination from the team who, ultimately, want us to make them more successfull and a profit (if were being frank).

Now i know i havent been that active recently on the wiki, but i have been reading the mailing lists and talking in irc, but the main reason for me not being active on the wiki, is mainly the fact that i just dont have the motivation to do anything because of the above. Frankly atm its a stale project, but hopefully this rant (which i hate doing) will mean that the project will hopefully become better.

If i have offended anyone above then i am sorry, but i feel that certain things need to be said right now, in order to make the project better, which is my aim.

Many thanks and look forward to the responses to this, especially from wikia staff

Regards

mark

(user:Markie)
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Gardner is no longer disputing the past improprieties raised by former Wikipedia administrator Danny Wool; now she's just arguing it's a distraction from Wikipedia's mission. And then she attempts to change the subject to this humble gossip blog: "I used to say Valleywag was read by 11-year-old boys, but now I think that would be a disservice to 11-year-old boys." Gardner said that in the course of denying claims by former employees that she made out with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in Amsterdam. We were starting to wonder why Gardner kept bringing up 11-year-old boys, until we realized they make up Wikipedia's core demographic.

That's at least a year after the dates of the claims made by former employee Danny Wool, who was pretty clear on Monday that "This questionable use of Foundation funds stopped in 2006, largely because Jimbeau's credit card was taken away." CNET didn't ask Gardner to confirm or deny the claims made by non-former-employees, including the Slashdot-suing entrepreneur who allegedly got a page erased in exchange for a $5,000 donation.

Forget the bimbo eruptions. Rachel Marsden wasn't Wales's first wild fling, and it won't be his last. Wales used to run Bomis, which he describes as a "Web portal" and the rest of the world calls a "porn site."

What Wikipedians need to ask is where their money is going. Ads have been appearing on Wikipedia for months soliciting donations, ostensibly to pay for bandwidth and other costs of running the site. How will those donors feel when they learn that they funded Wales's extravagant trips? (In his chats with Marsden, he brags about how he flies first class, though he only got first-class tickets when flying on a speaker's dime.)

And ultimately one can't really separate money and sex. Wool suggests Wales visited a massage parlor on a trip to Russia — and expensed the subway ticket he used to get there. To what extent has Wales mixed business and pleasure? Only Devouard and the other staff at Wikimedia Foundation, the charity which runs Wikipedia, know for sure. But the IRS, which must approve of Wikimedia's nonprofit status, may start asking questions.