On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Pot meet kettle. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Talk%3AHomeopathy%2FDraft&diff=1004...
A lot of people have the sort of double standard I discussed in my WP:SAUCE essay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sauce_for_the_goose_is_(not)_sa uce_for_the_gander
You guys are right, and you're wrong. Sanger seems to be factually correct in his assertion of co-foundership given that Jimbo himself put matters that way until inexplicably changing his mind later. However, when he insists on a "right" to state his point here, he starts sounding like various crackpots who insist on their "right" to rant everywhere they want to, even on private property. On the other hand, it isn't very healthy for this project to take an attitude of "if you can't argue logically against that guy's point, just call him a troll and ban him!" A wide degree of free speech in meta- discussion is in keeping with the aims of the project, which is the point I made (or dead horse I kept beating...) during the BADSITES wars.
2009/4/12 Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name:
You guys are right, and you're wrong. Sanger seems to be factually correct in his assertion of co-foundership given that Jimbo himself put matters that way until inexplicably changing his mind later. However, when he insists on a "right" to state his point here, he starts sounding like various crackpots who insist on their "right" to rant everywhere they want to, even on private property. On the other hand, it isn't very healthy for this project to take an attitude of "if you can't argue logically against that guy's point, just call him a troll and ban him!" A wide degree of free speech in meta- discussion is in keeping with the aims of the project, which is the point I made (or dead horse I kept beating...) during the BADSITES wars.
Larry isn't on moderation. However, when he's going headlong into green ink territory, I'm most certainly going to say so.
- d.
On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 8:45 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Larry isn't on moderation. However, when he's going headlong into green ink territory, I'm most certainly going to say so.
I seriously doubt that you'd be the only one.
--Oskar
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Pot meet kettle. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Talk%3AHomeopathy%2FDraft&diff=1004...
A lot of people have the sort of double standard I discussed in my WP:SAUCE essay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sauce_for_the_goose_is_(not)_sa uce_for_the_gander
You guys are right, and you're wrong. Sanger seems to be factually correct in his assertion of co-foundership given that Jimbo himself put matters that way until inexplicably changing his mind later. However, when he insists on a "right" to state his point here, he starts sounding like various crackpots who insist on their "right" to rant everywhere they want to, even on private property. On the other hand, it isn't very healthy for this project to take an attitude of "if you can't argue logically against that guy's point, just call him a troll and ban him!" A wide degree of free speech in meta- discussion is in keeping with the aims of the project, which is the point I made (or dead horse I kept beating...) during the BADSITES wars.
I think *this* is something that needs to be addressed. Larry's shrill effrontery does not, but if people are confused to the degree that they think his views have merit, that clearly needs to be clarified.
What has been muddied in all this is the question of *what* precisely does Sanger claim to have co-founded.
Personally my view is that if we are talking about taking credit for starting a quick and dirty scratchpad for creating material from which experts can cull "the good stuff" for Nupedia; I am not interested who gets the credit. That I think is a discredited approach - though perhaps Veropedia will in the future prove even that temporary judgment to not have been ultimately unassailable; in which case the original conception of wikipedia as a mere scratchpad will have been somewhat vindicated.
What would *really* interest me, and what I consider to be the seminal moment - even the foundational moment - in creating the wikipedia we all know; is when somebody made the conceptual breakthrough to the vision of wikipedia as something sui generis, and freestanding.
I am betting there were hold-outs fairly long into the last days of Nupedia, who still thought it should be revivified in some form. I think for anyone who really wants to put a face on the founding of wikipedia, it would serve well if we revisited that particular period, and gave credit to who ever it was that first suggested that Wikipedia was *it*, and Nupedia wasn't. If that was Larry Sanger, I *do* think he deserves the credit, though that would clearly make him an apostate, since he has clearly spent much of his time lately arguing that no, after all, wikipedia _wasn't_ *it*.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
This is exactly what matters. From what I can tell Sanger wrote much of Wikipedia's initialy policy - policy that lives on today in various edited forms. Not only was he key in coming up with the more formal guidelines for Nupedia, he personally wrote many of the informal guidelines that came to be used on Wikipedia. This is well documented on archive.org and Wikipedia itself.
Let's be clear that, especially after the failure of Nupedia to take off, Wikipedia's success was a surprise both to Sanger and Wales. Neither of them expected that this would happen and can therefore not take full or too much credit for it. Both of their lives have been redefined by Wikipedia's success and it seems reasonably human to not want to let go of that. At the same time, while an individual can co-found an encyclopedia, they cannot take credit for the community's work.
I say this because I get the feeling that Wales and Sanger both believe there is a lot at stake here and at the same time I feel that they both take too much credit for what has happened. What they did is akin to writing an academic paper that first introduces an idea. They cannot claim authorship or credit for all of the publications that cite their initial publication - just the initial idea. It seems clear that this initial idea was authored and implemented by Sanger & Wales (2001?). It would be a grave injustice to just cite Wales (2001) if the idea was only part, or not even, his.
On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 10:16 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen < cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
but if people are confused to the degree that they think his views have merit, that clearly needs to be clarified.
What has been muddied in all this is the question of *what* precisely does Sanger claim to have co-founded.
[...]
What would *really* interest me, and what I consider to be the seminal moment - even the foundational moment - in creating the wikipedia we all know; is when somebody made the conceptual breakthrough to the vision of wikipedia as something sui generis, and freestanding.
I am betting there were hold-outs fairly long into the last days of Nupedia, who still thought it should be revivified in some form. I think for anyone who really wants to put a face on the founding of wikipedia, it would serve well if we revisited that particular period, and gave credit to who ever it was that first suggested that Wikipedia was *it*, and Nupedia wasn't. If that was Larry Sanger, I *do* think he deserves the credit, though that would clearly make him an apostate, since he has clearly spent much of his time lately arguing that no, after all, wikipedia _wasn't_ *it*.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
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Brian wrote:
I say this because I get the feeling that Wales and Sanger both believe there is a lot at stake here and at the same time I feel that they both take too much credit for what has happened. What they did is akin to writing an academic paper that first introduces an idea. They cannot claim authorship or credit for all of the publications that cite their initial publication - just the initial idea. It seems clear that this initial idea was authored and implemented by Sanger & Wales (2001?). It would be a grave injustice to just cite Wales (2001) if the idea was only part, or not even, his.
Since you frame your analogy in terms of scientific ideas, I think it would be much more accurate to put it in terms of Sanger & Wales putting forth a later discredited theory, which however was tangential and part of the broader scientific thread of inquiry that eventually brought forth a tenable theory.
To put it in more concrete terms, visualize Sanger & Wales (2001) as being Lamarckianism. Something close, but not quite on point. Wikipedia, as it stands now, would be Darwinism, very well established as the most robust theory out there, but with important wrinkles that still need to be ironed out.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
This is exactly what matters. From what I can tell Sanger wrote much of Wikipedia's initialy policy - policy that lives on today in various edited forms. Not only was he key in coming up with the more formal guidelines for Nupedia, he personally wrote many of the informal guidelines that came to be used on Wikipedia. This is well documented on archive.org and Wikipedia itself.
[snip]
It seems clear that this initial idea was authored and implemented by Sanger & Wales (2001?). It would be a grave injustice to just cite Wales (2001) if the idea was only part, or not even, his.
Sanger probably had the initial idea, but Wales listened to him. Wales paid for the initial operation and supported the project financially for at least a year, including paying wages to Sanger. Sanger came up with a lot of policy, but Wales insisted on assume good faith and lived it. Sanger himself might have torn the project up banning people if given his way.
Fred Bauder
What would *really* interest me, and what I consider to be the seminal moment - even the foundational moment - in creating the wikipedia we all know; is when somebody made the conceptual breakthrough to the vision of wikipedia as something sui generis, and freestanding.
I am betting there were hold-outs fairly long into the last days of Nupedia, who still thought it should be revivified in some form. I think for anyone who really wants to put a face on the founding of wikipedia, it would serve well if we revisited that particular period, and gave credit to who ever it was that first suggested that Wikipedia was *it*, and Nupedia wasn't. If that was Larry Sanger, I *do* think he deserves the credit, though that would clearly make him an apostate, since he has clearly spent much of his time lately arguing that no, after all, wikipedia _wasn't_ *it*.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
When I came on in 2002, Nupedia was still alive, had half a dozen articles, including one in development. Essentially it was dead, but Sanger had not given up on it. Anything you contributed that was not approved by an expert in the field was just lost. There was not even a transparent way to communicate with that expert. See http://www.starfishandspider.com/index.php?title=Wikipedia for more of my observations.
What really made Wikipedia was free publicity from Slashdot and The New York Times during 2001. I don't know if I could find the initial Slashdoting, but here are the links to the two New York Times articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/20/technology/fact-driven-collegial-this-site...
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/magazine/the-year-in-ideas-a-to-z-populist...
So I would say at least some of the credit goes to folks who recognized a good idea and alerted the rest of the intellectual and internet community to it.
Fred Bauder
Probably March 2001 would be the earliest slashdotting:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/02/1422244
And right at the end it says:
Hector, who started the 'gnupedia' project recently wrote this on his mailing list:
"Now, the FSF's plans are give all the support to the Nupedia project. So Nupedia will become the official GNU encyclopedia."
-0) "Nupedia seems to be too centralized and slow moving for me. I understand the need for quality control, but wouldn't it make more sense to have a more bazaar-type free encyclopedia project?"
Maybe so! People who want to get started _today_ on contributing free texts to the world can do so at Wikipedia. All the content is released under the GNU FDL, and it already has over 1000 articles. Short, and maybe not the high quality of Nupedia, but with time? Who knows..."
On 13/04/2009, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
What really made Wikipedia was free publicity from Slashdot and The New York Times during 2001. I don't know if I could find the initial Slashdoting, but here are the links to the two New York Times articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/20/technology/fact-driven-collegial-this-site...
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/magazine/the-year-in-ideas-a-to-z-populist...
So I would say at least some of the credit goes to folks who recognized a good idea and alerted the rest of the intellectual and internet community to it.
Fred Bauder
Ian Woollard arranged electrons to indicate (back on 04/13/2009 10:09 AM) that:
Probably March 2001 would be the earliest slashdotting:
Shortly after reading that Slashdot article I became Wikipedia user #30.
-----Original Message----- From: Sean Barrett sean@epoptic.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 1:59 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales
Ian Woollard arranged electrons to indicate (back on 04/13/2009 10:09 AM) that:
Probably March 2001 would be the earliest slashdotting:
Shortly after reading that Slashdot article I became Wikipedia user #30.
--------------------------
There's a way to tell the order in which people joined Wikipedia? What is it?
Will Johnson
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 11:04 PM, wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
<snip>
There's a way to tell the order in which people joined Wikipedia? What is it?
Possibly [[Special:Preferences]], and your user ID. My user ID is between 165,000 and 166,000. And I created my account on 8 January 2005.
Carcharoth
-----Original Message----- From: Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 3:13 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 11:04 PM, wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
<snip>
There's a way to tell the order in which people joined Wikipedia? What is it?
Possibly [[Special:Preferences]], and your user ID. My user ID is between 165,000 and 166,000. And I created my account on 8 January 2005.
Carcharoth ---------------------------------
I never knew this. Checking now I see that I am Wikipedian #29958 (in order of creation), having created my account Nov 2003
Will Johnson
Speaking of Hector, can someone translate this for me: "¿Habéis pensado en diseñar un Wiki específico para el trabajo de pulir los módulos-entradas?. Muchos proyectos de Software están considerando aprovechar la dinámica "Document-mode" de los Wikis como una alternativa a las "message boards" que permite una documentación persistente, no repetitiva e hipertextualmente articulada de los temas que se van tratando a petición de los usuarios." It was written by Álvaro Tejero Cantero on December 24, 2000, just a week before the conversation at the taco stand. I can't figure out if it's talking about software, or if it's talking about...well...Wikipedia.
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.comwrote:
Probably March 2001 would be the earliest slashdotting:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/02/1422244
And right at the end it says:
Hector, who started the 'gnupedia' project recently wrote this on his mailing list:
"Now, the FSF's plans are give all the support to the Nupedia project. So Nupedia will become the official GNU encyclopedia."
-0) "Nupedia seems to be too centralized and slow moving for me. I understand the need for quality control, but wouldn't it make more sense to have a more bazaar-type free encyclopedia project?"
Maybe so! People who want to get started _today_ on contributing free texts to the world can do so at Wikipedia. All the content is released under the GNU FDL, and it already has over 1000 articles. Short, and maybe not the high quality of Nupedia, but with time? Who knows..."
On 13/04/2009, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
What really made Wikipedia was free publicity from Slashdot and The New York Times during 2001. I don't know if I could find the initial Slashdoting, but here are the links to the two New York Times articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/20/technology/fact-driven-collegial-this-site...
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/magazine/the-year-in-ideas-a-to-z-populist...
So I would say at least some of the credit goes to folks who recognized a good idea and alerted the rest of the intellectual and internet community to it.
Fred Bauder
-- -Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be *much* better. Life in an imperfectly perfect world would be pretty ghastly though.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I used Google Translate. I would post the entire translation here, but not sure if that is OK or not, so I'm only posting the translation of the first sentence.
"Have you thought about Wiki design a specific work of polishing modules-tickets?"
Looks like a poor translation anyway.
Carcharoth
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Speaking of Hector, can someone translate this for me: "¿Habéis pensado en diseñar un Wiki específico para el trabajo de pulir los módulos-entradas?. Muchos proyectos de Software están considerando aprovechar la dinámica "Document-mode" de los Wikis como una alternativa a las "message boards" que permite una documentación persistente, no repetitiva e hipertextualmente articulada de los temas que se van tratando a petición de los usuarios." It was written by Álvaro Tejero Cantero on December 24, 2000, just a week before the conversation at the taco stand. I can't figure out if it's talking about software, or if it's talking about...well...Wikipedia.
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.comwrote:
Probably March 2001 would be the earliest slashdotting:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/02/1422244
And right at the end it says:
Hector, who started the 'gnupedia' project recently wrote this on his mailing list:
"Now, the FSF's plans are give all the support to the Nupedia project. So Nupedia will become the official GNU encyclopedia."
-0) "Nupedia seems to be too centralized and slow moving for me. I understand the need for quality control, but wouldn't it make more sense to have a more bazaar-type free encyclopedia project?"
Maybe so! People who want to get started _today_ on contributing free texts to the world can do so at Wikipedia. All the content is released under the GNU FDL, and it already has over 1000 articles. Short, and maybe not the high quality of Nupedia, but with time? Who knows..."
On 13/04/2009, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
What really made Wikipedia was free publicity from Slashdot and The New York Times during 2001. I don't know if I could find the initial Slashdoting, but here are the links to the two New York Times articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/20/technology/fact-driven-collegial-this-site...
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/magazine/the-year-in-ideas-a-to-z-populist...
So I would say at least some of the credit goes to folks who recognized a good idea and alerted the rest of the intellectual and internet community to it.
Fred Bauder
-- -Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be *much* better. Life in an imperfectly perfect world would be pretty ghastly though.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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I get stuck on the term "módulos-entradas", which seems to be literally translated as "input modules", but I can't fit into the context. Here's the context, by the way: http://softlibre.barrapunto.com/article.pl?sid=00/12/21/0849254
Anyway, I was just rereading some of the discussion of Larry Sanger and Wikipedia, and noticed that while Wales claims that Jeremy Rosenfeld was the first to propose using wikis to work on Nupedia, he admits that it was Sanger who convinced him to actually do it. Further, Sanger agrees that "probably...hundreds of people had the idea about a wiki encyclopedia before Wikipedia got started, and even told each other about it." So despite what I see as Wales intentional attempt to distort the issue, by mentioning certain seemingly contradictory facts and then failing to elaborate on them, I think I've got a fairly well agreed upon version of the events as they happened.
I feel I ought to continue that quote from Larry, rather than risk taking it out of context. Sanger continued: "But it was the idea I had, while tasked with solving Nupedia's problem, that actually and directly led to the development of Wikipedia. That is a matter of historical fact, in living memory of several people--including Jimmy, whether he admits it or not. " And Wales responded with "Of course I 'admit' it. :-)"
I'd the say the Jeremy Rosenfeld bit, if true, actually enhances Sanger's contribution to the creation of Wikipedia, in that it shows that merely mentioning wikis to Wales wasn't enough to bring the idea to fruition. It's good to reread those old messages, because I had somehow gotten the impression that the fact that it was Sanger's idea, and not Rosenfeld's, which actually and directly led to the development of Wikipedia, was a matter of dispute.
On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 9:40 AM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.comwrote:
I used Google Translate. I would post the entire translation here, but not sure if that is OK or not, so I'm only posting the translation of the first sentence.
"Have you thought about Wiki design a specific work of polishing modules-tickets?"
Looks like a poor translation anyway.
Carcharoth
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Speaking of Hector, can someone translate this for me: "¿Habéis pensado
en
diseñar un Wiki específico para el trabajo de pulir los
módulos-entradas?.
Muchos proyectos de Software están considerando aprovechar la dinámica "Document-mode" de los Wikis como una alternativa a las "message boards"
que
permite una documentación persistente, no repetitiva e hipertextualmente articulada de los temas que se van tratando a petición de los usuarios."
It
was written by Álvaro Tejero Cantero on December 24, 2000, just a week before the conversation at the taco stand. I can't figure out if it's talking about software, or if it's talking about...well...Wikipedia.
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
Probably March 2001 would be the earliest slashdotting:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/02/1422244
And right at the end it says:
Hector, who started the 'gnupedia' project recently wrote this on his mailing list:
"Now, the FSF's plans are give all the support to the Nupedia project. So Nupedia will become the official GNU encyclopedia."
-0) "Nupedia seems to be too centralized and slow moving for me. I understand the need for quality control, but wouldn't it make more sense to have a more bazaar-type free encyclopedia project?"
Maybe so! People who want to get started _today_ on contributing free texts to the world can do so at Wikipedia. All the content is released under the GNU FDL, and it already has over 1000 articles. Short, and maybe not the high quality of Nupedia, but with time? Who knows..."
On 13/04/2009, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
What really made Wikipedia was free publicity from Slashdot and The
New
York Times during 2001. I don't know if I could find the initial Slashdoting, but here are the links to the two New York Times
articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/20/technology/fact-driven-collegial-this-site...
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/magazine/the-year-in-ideas-a-to-z-populist...
So I would say at least some of the credit goes to folks who
recognized a
good idea and alerted the rest of the intellectual and internet
community
to it.
Fred Bauder
-- -Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be *much* better. Life in an imperfectly perfect world would be pretty ghastly though.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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