Geoff Burling wrote:
On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
For those of you who were around when it kicked off... when it went live, was it intended to become a reference tool *on the web* like it has now, or was the web process intended to be somewhat less obvious than it became (a top-40 site, eek)? Open, yes, freely editable, yes, but a live "proper" encyclopedia from Year One?
My first edit was on 2 January 2002. Boy was the place a mess (have you seen UseMod ; ugly ; en.wikipedia had less than 20,000 articles and Larry Sanger was still around). But I loved it since there was so much to do. Almost every article I saw was obviously a work in progress. We were still working out basic rules and conventions. WikiProjects were just getting underway. Just about anybody could have a major influence on policy formation and the direction of WikiProjects.
At the time we thought it would take us 5 years to to reach our initial goal of 100,000 articles. All the focus I saw was on development, not use in the near to mid term. I don't think anybody, except maybe Jimbo, could have dreamed we would get so popular so fast, or so useful.
Now when I look around, most articles that cover subjects encyclopedias should cover look fairly complete. Articles on technology, popular culture, and current events are even better on average.
Wikipedia becoming useful; well, that is something that kinda snuck up on me while I was helping make it useful. I'm sure it also surprised many other old timers as well. The idea seemed too far in the future to even think about.
I haven't been around as long as Mav (I still kinda consider him one of the "authentic original Wikipedians"), but much of what he says above could be my words.
But if I could build on what he wrote, one thing worth noting is the speed of change in this project. I've mentioned in the past the problem that some important policies are proposed & adopted before some of us who have been on Wikipedia for a while notice. Usually there is no problem: give me a little time to understand & adjust, & I will accept any new proposal that is based on common sense.
Another point is that I feel compelled to defend the quality of Wikipedia because, in part, it is my baby, but also because I know that the professional experts are guilty of more acts of botched analyses & bad writing than they want to admit to. Wikipedia is not only reinventing the idea of an encyclopedia but also the (excuse me) paradigm of academia: while our structure makes it easy for cranks, kooks & partisans to push their own agendas here, it also frees us from the abuse of authorities who expect us to accept their biasses as profound new discoveries or insights.
I've been here only slightly less long than Mav, and I amaze myself to know that I have stuck it out for nearly four years. Like Geoff and Mav I have bought into an idea that is both an encyclopedia and more than an encyclopedia. I would probably call myself an eventualist, but around here eventually comes around awful fast. I am concerned about the quality of Wikipedia, but I'm not worried about it. I don't read into the presence of an embarassingly bad article a projection of a huge number of such bad articles. Considering the resource restraints we have an excellent product. I don't feel that the quality is brought down by having a few seemingly trivial articles. I do not see obsessive rulemaking as the solution to our woes.
Paradigm shifts are not brought about by repeating experiments of the past. Rules want to put the new paradigm into a bottle so that it can be marketted, but you can no more do that than you can put a lit candle into a closed bottle without have it go out for lack of oxygen. When others dwell on having the perfect article, or on setting up Wikiversity with the same educational patterns of courses, exams and essays I'm left with the impression that they don't understand the paradigm shift at all. A real paradigm shift is painful for a society, because the old ways don't work anymore; those who relied on old ways for sustenance can no longer do so. I sometime find the cranks and kooks easier to deal with than the people who are trying to set up elaborate systems for dealing with those same cranks and kooks.
Ec