It would succeed the same way Quora does. Much less open, much less universal, much more user hostile, with an almost agressive way to deal with unlogged user.
In terms of financial and organisational success it would probably largely beat what it is now. It terms of benefit to humanity, it would be much worse.
Company + for profit + laws means access to information has to be much more tailored to the laws of each place. "Let's remove tianamen's article or lose your chinese license" kind of things.
I'm for one am glad for the current wikipedia we have, despite it's numerous flaws. I still donate every year, although I wish Wales could stop having it spend its money the same a startup or FAANG does.
That's one option, though I wouldn't necessarily use Quora as a mainline example. They're kind of a $gme for rich people. I think highly enough of Jimmy to bet on him doing a much better job than that.
Stackoverflow is a decent example. Very capable founding team. They explicitly tried to be like a commercial wikimedia. They do embrace quite a lot of openness, notably creative commons... learning from wikimedia successes.
RE "I wish Wales would:" Another consequence for how wikipedia is structured is that Wales isn't the Zuckerberg of Wikimedia. Power is a lot more dispersed.
RE spending/flaws and such: I feel like wikimedia is held to an extremely unfair standard. Who/what should we compare them to?
Wikimedia spend $70m per year. This is probably less than Quora or stackexchange. FB & Twitter (IMO more comparable in terms of scale/importance) spend $55bn & $3bn. Twitter spends 45X more than Wikimedia. Facebook spends almost 1,000X compared to Wikimedia. The bang-for-buck is insane.
Also in terms of flaws in rules/judgement calls. A lot of people are highly critical of wikipedia's "deletionism" related MOs. What articles/edits stay in. How good the rules & procedures are for this. What "camp" has power, and how they treat the other camp. I get that this stuff is contentious.
Meanwhile on Twitter or Facebook, the rule is "I decide." "But it gets us clicks" is the killer argument. Nothing is transparent. Wikimedia is doing a much better job, respecting user & editor rights far more, being a lot less self righteous. Of course it's not perfect, but come on. The "norm" is Facebook's content policy, Twitter's safety department, or Apple's App store approval room. Wikimedia is the one example of being better than that... and for that everyone is always yelling at them.
Quora imo is a horrible website and I rarely find actually good advice on it. At this point I actively avoid clicking on it's links because of how aggressive they are towards non logged users.
In terms of financial and organisational success it would probably largely beat what it is now. It terms of benefit to humanity, it would be much worse.
Company + for profit + laws means access to information has to be much more tailored to the laws of each place. "Let's remove tianamen's article or lose your chinese license" kind of things.
I'm for one am glad for the current wikipedia we have, despite it's numerous flaws. I still donate every year, although I wish Wales could stop having it spend its money the same a startup or FAANG does.