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He's extracted a pretty good life from wikipedia, but nothing compared to your typical SV start-up founder would demand, so I'm totally OK with this.

That's basically it. Naked Greed and convincing yourself that monetizing a thing you think you invented but which invariably turns out to be people's attention is always good in and of itself. I've been in or inside lots of wonderful things created as the Internet has evolved, and almost all end up this way.

Oh it's definitely been corrupted: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Note the article is written by the same guy who wrote the email in the original post.