I think that one of the main problems in describing antecedents is that most people and sources are much more interested in the source of something rather than what leads up to it. There's something that seems more notable about the first occurrence rather than intermediate, possibly even failed steps.
--- On Fri, 8/8/08, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote: From: Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com Subject: [WikiEN-l] Knowledge web, the James Burke institute To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Friday, August 8, 2008, 6:16 PM
This is quite interesting:
It's the James Burke institute which is related to James Burke who wrote the famous 'Connections' documentary from back in the 70s.
Basically, they're trying to build webs of connections between things, and plotting them in 3D, so you could pick something, like the computer and trace backwards and find out what things led to its creation.
They're doing it the hard way, but it struck me that the wikipedia might be mined for this kind of thing- that many connections may already be there and that the dates contained in articles might allow a creation of an interactive graphic for looking at the wikipedia in a new way.
It also struck me that perhaps the wikipedia doesn't value antecedents very highly. I think that history sections tend to cover the first example of something, but not so much things that lead up to it, that weren't it, or forces that helped create it or make it practical or economic to do that way.