Hello,
I could imagine that such a statement, in a different form, comes originally from socialist or anti-socialist circles.
By the way, I am not such a big fan of this seemingly witty remark. If there is a conflict between theory and practice, that means that your theory is bad and has to be adjusted to practice. (In Soviet Union it was the other way round, reality had to be shaped conforming to the theory, that's why I believe the idea comes from somewhere there.)
If your theory is that Wikipedia is anarchy and creative chaos and swarm intelligence etc., then, of course, Wikipedia does not work in theory. :-)
Kind regards Ziko
2010/6/17 geni geniice@gmail.com:
On 17 June 2010 21:37, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 1:19 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Here's the phrase in a 1988 sociology paper:
http://jpart.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/1/1/19
I'd call it a pretty obvious play on words, though, so I really doubt we got it from that.
Anyone got a complete wikien-l archive to grovel through?
- d.
going back that far it might be on wikipedia-l, I think, and Joseph Reagle has done quite a bit of work analyzing that -- maybe he can help. We're looking for the orgins of the quote: "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in theory. It could never work in practice."
Well I can search wikipedia-en-l as far back as 13.09.04 and I'm not coming up with anything. Running google searches for mentions pre 2006 doesn't turn up anything however use explodes in 2006 which is rather fast if than jan 2006 use is the first.
-- geni
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