New subject: An open letter to Jimmy Wales

14 Apr 2009

On Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:04:20 -0700, Delirium wrote:

...
  I think you might also be aiming at the wrong audience
to some extent. 
 You seem to accept the media-narrative "founder myth" of Wikipedia as 
 this thing that sprang whole cloth out of nothingness due to the 
 ingenuity of Jimmy Wales; save only that you'd like to modify the credit 
 to include Larry Sanger in an equally or more prominent role. But my 
 impression is that this is mainly an external view. Most of the 
 knowledgeable Wikipedians I know take a more complex view, crediting to 
 various degrees: Ward Cunningham's development of wikis; the development 
 of community and social norms on WikiWikiWeb and MeatballWiki; the 
 expansion of subject-specific wiki encyclopedias from the original 
 design-patterns-encyclopedia focus of WikiWikiWeb to cover ever more 
 areas of knowledge; the parallel cropping up of non-wiki "all human 
 knowledge written by random people on the internet" compendia like 
 Everything2; and so on. 
... and Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web; the ARPAnet 
pioneers for creating the network on which the Web operated; Ted 
Nelson for inventing hypertext;  Xerox PARC for creating the elements 
of the modern user interface that Apple stole from them and Microsoft 
stole from Apple; the original IBM PC development team for creating 
the PC platform which brought personal computers into the mainstream 
and made it possible for the Internet and Web to be a mass medium; 
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs for showing that home computers were a 
reasonable idea in the first place; the developers of the Altair 
computer for showing that computers didn't have to be huge million-
dollar hulks; the pioneers of mainframe computers for creating those 
million-dollar hulks in the first place and letting computer science 
begin as a discipline of knowledge; Edison and/or Tesla for making 
electricity ubiquitous and all those later devices possible; Ben 
Franklin for making discoveries about electricity the later inventors 
could build on.... and so on and on and on.  Everybody builds on the 
discoveries and inventions of those who came before.

-- 
== Dan ==
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Re: [WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales