Larry Singer was essentially running Wikipedia in the early days though, until he was laid off, so in some sense we could think of him as a co-founder who was ousted. It's true that he didn't contribute much (as an unpaid volunteer) after that though.

If someone builds a free knowledge-repository platform and makes it available for worldwide use, and if that platform takes off to become commonly used globally, then I think some credit is due to such founder and innovator.