Jimmy wrote:
Gee, settle down. I'm not accusing anyone of lying about anything. I'm just adding an interesting bit of historical trivia.
Jimmy, I'm calm enough, just very disillusioned. The above is disingenuous, because you wrote:
The original idea for a wiki for Wikipedia was not proposed by Larry, but by Jeremy Rosenfeld.
This implies that a Jeremy Rosenfeld actually caused the precursor of Wikipedia to come into existence on January 3 or 4. In fact, the idea came out of my head; if Jeremy Rosenfeld told you anything, that had no causal influence on the development of Wikipedia, which would not have happened had I not had the idea. You certainly never gave *me* the idea, and you never mentioned that anyone had ever even told you about the existence of wikis before January 3.
So when you now write "The original idea for a wiki for Wikipedia was not proposed by Larry," you are not "just adding an interesting bit of historical trivia"; you are saying something false, which does a considerable disservice to me. Indeed, it makes a liar out of me and out of the Wikipedia history page as it has existed since 2001.
If Jeremy Rosenfeld's telling you anything had any effect on the situation, which I have to doubt given the fact that you've never mentioned it until now, it was that it made you well disposed to agree to set up a wiki for me to start working on and organizing, which we certainly would have pursued after I had made the proposal--after all, it was easy to set up and I was excited about it, so you could scarcely refuse.
But it was I who made the proposal which led to Wikipedia, and I who organized the whole thing. I even named the damned thing. You *know* all this, Jimmy.
You also wrote, very misleadingly:
Larry wrote: "Jimmy then started a specialized policy page he called 'Neutral Point of View'" and goes on to explain that he feels that the term became popular because it was used "by Wikipedians wanting to seem hip" -- failing, I think, to recognize the special innovation that NPOV is (as a social concept of co-operation which avoids some philosophical dilemmas posed by such concepts as 'biased'), instead assuming that this is just a cute phrase of hipsters.
Larry might be right or wrong about his disapproval of NPOV of course.
Of course I have always supported a neutrality policy. Jimmy, how can you imply otherwise? This is all very disillusioning. If anything, I had to persuade *you* to support the neutrality policy. (I know, anyway, that I had to persuade Tim.)
You neglected to quote the preceding paragraphs, which make it perfectly clear that it is the wording, the phrase, "the neutral point of view," that I object to. The *policy* is one that I supported and indeed insisted on, more strongly than anyone, for both Nupedia and Wikipedia. You fail to quote the part that explains that there was a nonbias policy on Wikipedia for some time before you happened to set up the "NPOV" page. You also fail to quote the part that explains why I object to the phrasing "the neutral point of view."
Also, this needs some explanation:
We argued constantly during the era of Nupedia, with me pressing for more openness, and he pressing for more academic standards -- and I let him win those arguments because _knowing what we knew then_, he was drawing the correct conclusions. Knowing what we know now, of course, his design for Nupedia was a failure. But that's easy to criticize in retrospect -- Larry deserves credit for it despite the failure because we did _not_ know what we know now.
We did not "argue constantly" during the era of Nupedia. We negotiated to a mutually satisfactory solution. Then, we *agreed* that the Nupedia project--which was not designed by me alone, but, like Wikipedia, with the help of the users--was way too slow and not open enough. Moreover, we *agreed* (no argument here) that a new system needed to be set up. I solved the problem by getting the idea for Wikipedia and getting it started, under the broad set of policy guidelines under which it still operates. I also deserve credit for that, Jimmy, and I had been given credit, until recently.
That's one of the reasons I wrote my memoir in the first place, where all of this is explained.
This whole thing makes me sick to my stomach, really. Literally. I had a Pepcid when I got up this morning.
--Larry