On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Oskar Sigvardsson < oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 4:38 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 10:12 PM, wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
And I would like to thank the Phoenicians for inventing the alphabet.
W.J. the Current.
I'd like to thank Necessity and her baby-daddy for inventing inventions.
I was going to thank the Proto-Indo-Europeans, but this is getting silly.
Getting silly? It got silly several messages ago. There's a fundamental difference between the contributions to Wikipedia of Larry Sanger, and those of Ted Nelson (or Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Edison, Tesla, etc). I'll leave in Tim Berners-Lee since I believe he has expressed the notion that Wikipedia is similar to his vision of what the web would be, though I haven't investigated that.
Wikipedia was certainly a compromise between the visions of many individuals, but that doesn't mean those individual visions and accomplishments can't be separated, and instead we must resort to a generic "made by the community". If Wales can't get 100% credit as "sole founder", then he wishes credit to be given to no one at all, but that doesn't mean we have to follow that reductio ad absurdium.