[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia was founded for OR

[gwern0 at gmail.com]

http://business.in.com/column/zen-garden/daddy-has-kira-to-thank/812/0
'Daddy has Kira to Thank: The world's most democratic storehouse of knowledge really began in a one-room school in Alabama; it took shape in a little girl's hospital bed'

"I decide to ask him that one question:
Tell us about something deeply personal that helped you shape your world view, that has made Wikipedia what it is.

A few seconds of silence follow.

Then, slowly, he recollects how as a child in Huntsville, Alabama, he was home-schooled until his eighth grade. His mother and grandmother ran a one-room school at home where there were four other children. They ran classes for children of different grades all in the same room. So a child could opt to learn whatever — it was not driven by a system, but by a child’s quest to know. And of course, the place was full of encyclopedias of all kinds. So, as a child, Wales built affection for the idea of encyclopedias. That was the root! A few more seconds of silence follow.

Then Wales clears his throat and says, “I have never told this before, but there is something else deeply personal that impacted me. My daughter Kira, suffered from a rare condition from birth that would have eventually killed her. She was a newborn baby with very rare lung incapacity with no known cure. A certain doctor in San Diego had found an untested cure that seemed to work on at least some children. But its outcome was not conclusively proven. So, parents who took their children had to make a call. The procedure required the child to be paralysed for a few moments and it was repeated a number of times before the child’s lungs began to function normally again.

Left with no other options, we agreed to give it a try. We watched as four times she was turned upside down, her entire system stopped and the lungs cleaned. At the end of it, she breathed and, thank God, has become perfectly normal.”

...

He wipes it off and begins haltingly.
“At the end of the procedure, I realized how precious the doctor’s knowledge was. It occurred to me that no one other than this doctor would ever know about this whole thing. There had to be a way”. And that is how Wikipedia came about. First as Nupedia, that went nowhere. For three years, it struggled with the concept of a free, Internet-based encyclopedia with expert review of content, before Wales turned the idea on its head, leaving the choice of editing content to anyone who was willing to. As one looks back, it isn’t the story of a young dot-commer who raised venture capital money at eyepopping valuations to become yet another private-jet owner."

I'm a little skeptical that this is any of the real reasons, given the fallibility of human memory, and never seeing anything like this mentioned in materials from the early days - but this would be a great reason, because this doctor is not described as publishing in an RS, so his knowledge is OR! (Bwa ha ha ha. This is almost as good as those Afghan news agencies not being RSs.)

-- 
gwern
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