I was looking at wikipedia-l to see how the community might react to my memoir. I haven't been subscribed for three years. But seeing Jimmy's comment impelled me to rejoin the list, for the sole purpose of confirming what has been on record for five years.
Jimmy wrote:
The original idea for a wiki for Wikipedia was not proposed by Larry, but by Jeremy Rosenfeld.
Who is Jeremy Rosenfeld? I'm afraid I don't remember, but I don't have a very good memory for names. Was he one of the people doing link weeding for Bomis?
I remember very clearly the evening when I got the idea for Wikipedia. It was January 2 and Ben Kovitz and I were eating at a Mexican restaurant just around the corner from the old Bomis office. (I could point out the place, if it still exists, but I forget the name.) Ben no doubt remembers it as well, because I told him almost immediately after he explained the concept of a wiki to me that it would be interesting to consider building a more free-wheeling encyclopedia project using a wiki. I told him that, even as we were still eating dinner. I remember writing a wiki encyclopedia proposal soon after I got home, I think that very night; I remember you saying that you liked the idea and that you'd set up the wiki. That would have been January 3. I think you (or maybe it was Jason Richey) actually put the wiki online either that day or the next. I think it was that very day, because I remember being happy that the thing had been set up so quickly. Over the next few days I started populating the wiki with the basic pages, and pitched the idea to Nupedia.
If Jeremy Rosenfeld told you about wikis, or suggested that wiki software could be used to run a wiki encyclopedia, you certainly never told *me* that; and in any case, it was not Jeremy Rosenfeld's conversation with you, but instead mine, that actually caused the precursor of Wikipedia to come into existence on January 3 or 4. I know how Wikipedia was originated, since, well, I did the origination. Moreover, I came up with the name for the project and shepherded it very closely from then through its first year.
Do you deny these claims, Jimmy?
If not, then what you say is simply false, is it not?--That "The original idea for a wiki for Wikipedia was not proposed by Larry, but by Jeremy Rosenfeld."
I just don't know what you could possibly thinking. Why don't you clarify for the list what you meant, precisely, in light of the facts as I have presented them? Surely you're not accusing *me* of having lied since practically the beginning of the project? Because, as you know, the above story has been the official story of the origin of the idea for Wikipedia since the beginning of the project. Why would you take five years to "set the record straight" and thereby accuse me of having been a liar all that time?
--Larry
It's a good thing you're back, Larry.
I had begun to tire of Phil Sandifer's endless attacks on your character. I don't believe these will continue in your presence.
Welcome back
Mark
On 19/04/05, lmsanger@sbcglobal.net lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
I was looking at wikipedia-l to see how the community might react to my memoir. I haven't been subscribed for three years. But seeing Jimmy's comment impelled me to rejoin the list, for the sole purpose of confirming what has been on record for five years.
Jimmy wrote:
The original idea for a wiki for Wikipedia was not proposed by Larry, but by Jeremy Rosenfeld.
Who is Jeremy Rosenfeld? I'm afraid I don't remember, but I don't have a very good memory for names. Was he one of the people doing link weeding for Bomis?
I remember very clearly the evening when I got the idea for Wikipedia. It was January 2 and Ben Kovitz and I were eating at a Mexican restaurant just around the corner from the old Bomis office. (I could point out the place, if it still exists, but I forget the name.) Ben no doubt remembers it as well, because I told him almost immediately after he explained the concept of a wiki to me that it would be interesting to consider building a more free-wheeling encyclopedia project using a wiki. I told him that, even as we were still eating dinner. I remember writing a wiki encyclopedia proposal soon after I got home, I think that very night; I remember you saying that you liked the idea and that you'd set up the wiki. That would have been January 3. I think you (or maybe it was Jason Richey) actually put the wiki online either that day or the next. I think it was that very day, because I remember being happy that the thing had been set up so quickly. Over the next few days I started populating the wiki with the basic pages, and pitched the idea to Nupedia.
If Jeremy Rosenfeld told you about wikis, or suggested that wiki software could be used to run a wiki encyclopedia, you certainly never told *me* that; and in any case, it was not Jeremy Rosenfeld's conversation with you, but instead mine, that actually caused the precursor of Wikipedia to come into existence on January 3 or 4. I know how Wikipedia was originated, since, well, I did the origination. Moreover, I came up with the name for the project and shepherded it very closely from then through its first year.
Do you deny these claims, Jimmy?
If not, then what you say is simply false, is it not?--That "The original idea for a wiki for Wikipedia was not proposed by Larry, but by Jeremy Rosenfeld."
I just don't know what you could possibly thinking. Why don't you clarify for the list what you meant, precisely, in light of the facts as I have presented them? Surely you're not accusing *me* of having lied since practically the beginning of the project? Because, as you know, the above story has been the official story of the origin of the idea for Wikipedia since the beginning of the project. Why would you take five years to "set the record straight" and thereby accuse me of having been a liar all that time?
--Larry
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Mark Williamson wrote:
It's a good thing you're back, Larry.
I had begun to tire of Phil Sandifer's endless attacks on your character. I don't believe these will continue in your presence.
I see no reason for them not to. It's quite clear that Larry Sanger has not put in a minute on Wikipedia for which he was not paid. He resigned and ended all involvement with the project immediately after he stopped receiving a paycheck for it, and his contact with the project since then has primarily taken the form of either attacking it or claiming credit for various parts of it (while still not actually being involved in it).
-Mark
I had begun to tire of Phil Sandifer's endless attacks on your character. I don't believe these will continue in your presence.
I see no reason for them not to.
I do. He's made his point. He doesn't like Larry. Good for him.
It's quite clear that Larry Sanger has not put in a minute on Wikipedia for which he was not paid.
I'll leave that for Larry to respond to.
He resigned and ended all involvement with the project immediately after he stopped receiving a paycheck for it,
Again, Larry can respond to that.
and his contact with the project since then has primarily taken the form of either attacking it or claiming credit for various parts of it (while still not actually being involved in it).
Perhaps you didn't see Jimbo's message. The things Larry says critically about Wikipedia aren't "attacks". They aren't intended maliciously.
The whole Wikipedia-l Attack Squad just loves to portray people in such caricatural ways - I remember when I was portrayed over and over as a snot-nosed little kid who liked to spam people and scream and shout and attack people personally.
You guys make Larry into a greedy, despicable man who has hated Wikipedia all along but stuck with it because it was profitable, and since then has done everything in his power to bring about its destruction. According to you guys, he also walks around telling people how he started Wikipedia, and cackling maniacally at the end of every other sentence.
This has got to stop.
(the other) Mark
Mark Williamson wrote:
Perhaps you didn't see Jimbo's message. The things Larry says critically about Wikipedia aren't "attacks". They aren't intended maliciously.
If he really intends his suggestions as constructive suggestions, rather than self-aggrandizement and media-whoring, why hasn't he participated in the many discussions of Wikipedia policy? There were in fact discussions of how to integrate review systems into Wikipedia which he did not participate in. The only comments I've heard from him are John-Katz-style essays published on other sites.
Perhaps his time is too valuable to bother actually participating in the project, in which case he's welcome to do something else. But if he's serious about improving the project, his views are likely to be better received if he actually participates in the policy discussions, and ideally actually edits the encyclopedia and generally participates as an active member of the project.
If, on the other hand, he's not going to be a member of the project, but wants to tell those who are how they should run it, well then he shouldn't be surprised if the reception is less than welcoming.
-Mark
On 4/20/05 12:12 AM, "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
You guys make Larry into a greedy, despicable man who has hated Wikipedia all along but stuck with it because it was profitable, and since then has done everything in his power to bring about its destruction. According to you guys, he also walks around telling people how he started Wikipedia, and cackling maniacally at the end of every other sentence.
I'd love to see references for the above claims (inferences?). I think you might be distorting what other people have said.
It's very simple. Just ask somebody who uses this list and has a g-mail account to search for "sanger" or "larry".
Of course, what I said is exaggerating a little, but not a lot - it really does sound like that except perhaps the cackling part.
Mark
On 20/04/05, The Cunctator cunctator@kband.com wrote:
On 4/20/05 12:12 AM, "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
You guys make Larry into a greedy, despicable man who has hated Wikipedia all along but stuck with it because it was profitable, and since then has done everything in his power to bring about its destruction. According to you guys, he also walks around telling people how he started Wikipedia, and cackling maniacally at the end of every other sentence.
I'd love to see references for the above claims (inferences?). I think you might be distorting what other people have said.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On 4/21/05 3:28 AM, "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
It's very simple. Just ask somebody who uses this list and has a g-mail account to search for "sanger" or "larry".
Of course, what I said is exaggerating a little, but not a lot - it really does sound like that except perhaps the cackling part.
Mark
On 20/04/05, The Cunctator cunctator@kband.com wrote:
On 4/20/05 12:12 AM, "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
You guys make Larry into a greedy, despicable man who has hated Wikipedia all along but stuck with it because it was profitable, and since then has done everything in his power to bring about its destruction. According to you guys, he also walks around telling people how he started Wikipedia, and cackling maniacally at the end of every other sentence.
I'd love to see references for the above claims (inferences?). I think you might be distorting what other people have said.
Okay--you've got a gmail account. Would you do the search?
The Cunctator wrote:
On 4/21/05 3:28 AM, "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
It's very simple. Just ask somebody who uses this list and has a g-mail account to search for "sanger" or "larry".
Of course, what I said is exaggerating a little, but not a lot - it really does sound like that except perhaps the cackling part.
Mark
On 20/04/05, The Cunctator cunctator@kband.com wrote:
On 4/20/05 12:12 AM, "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
You guys make Larry into a greedy, despicable man who has hated Wikipedia all along but stuck with it because it was profitable, and since then has done everything in his power to bring about its destruction. According to you guys, he also walks around telling people how he started Wikipedia, and cackling maniacally at the end of every other sentence.
I'd love to see references for the above claims (inferences?). I think you might be distorting what other people have said.
Okay--you've got a gmail account. Would you do the search?
I have both a gmail account and access to a text dump of the list - what should I search for? I'm curious what you think we'll find.
On 4/21/05 10:01 AM, "Alphax" alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
The Cunctator wrote:
On 4/21/05 3:28 AM, "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
On 20/04/05, The Cunctator cunctator@kband.com wrote:
On 4/20/05 12:12 AM, "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
You guys make Larry into a greedy, despicable man who has hated Wikipedia all along but stuck with it because it was profitable, and since then has done everything in his power to bring about its destruction. According to you guys, he also walks around telling people how he started Wikipedia, and cackling maniacally at the end of every other sentence.
I'd love to see references for the above claims (inferences?). I think you might be distorting what other people have said.
It's very simple. Just ask somebody who uses this list and has a g-mail account to search for "sanger" or "larry".
Of course, what I said is exaggerating a little, but not a lot - it really does sound like that except perhaps the cackling part.
Okay--you've got a gmail account. Would you do the search?
I have both a gmail account and access to a text dump of the list - what should I search for? I'm curious what you think we'll find.
According to Mark W., if you search for "sanger" or "larry", you should find people calling or implying that Sanger is a "greedy, despicable man who has hated Wikipedia all along but stuck with it because it was profitable, and since then has done everything in his power to bring about its destruction."
I'm interested in seeing if the above claim is accurate.
The Cunctator wrote:
On 4/21/05 10:01 AM, "Alphax" alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
The Cunctator wrote:
On 4/21/05 3:28 AM, "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
On 20/04/05, The Cunctator cunctator@kband.com wrote:
On 4/20/05 12:12 AM, "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
You guys make Larry into a greedy, despicable man who has hated Wikipedia all along but stuck with it because it was profitable, and since then has done everything in his power to bring about its destruction. According to you guys, he also walks around telling people how he started Wikipedia, and cackling maniacally at the end of every other sentence.
I'd love to see references for the above claims (inferences?). I think you might be distorting what other people have said.
It's very simple. Just ask somebody who uses this list and has a g-mail account to search for "sanger" or "larry".
Of course, what I said is exaggerating a little, but not a lot - it really does sound like that except perhaps the cackling part.
Okay--you've got a gmail account. Would you do the search?
I have both a gmail account and access to a text dump of the list - what should I search for? I'm curious what you think we'll find.
According to Mark W., if you search for "sanger" or "larry", you should find people calling or implying that Sanger is a "greedy, despicable man who has hated Wikipedia all along but stuck with it because it was profitable, and since then has done everything in his power to bring about its destruction."
I'm interested in seeing if the above claim is accurate.
I found:
Delirium wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
It's a good thing you're back, Larry.
I had begun to tire of Phil Sandifer's endless attacks on your character. I don't believe these will continue in your presence.
I see no reason for them not to. It's quite clear that Larry Sanger has not put in a minute on Wikipedia for which he was not paid. He resigned and ended all involvement with the project immediately after he stopped receiving a paycheck for it, and his contact with the project since then has primarily taken the form of either attacking it or claiming credit for various parts of it (while still not actually being involved in it).
-Mark
and
Phil Sandifer wrote:
Perhaps people began questioning it when they notice that he only uses the honorific to get press for his criticisms of a project that he does not contribute to, and in fact seems to have only contributed to when it was financially useful to him to do so.
-Snowspinner
On Apr 19, 2005, at 5:14 PM, Pete/Pcb21 wrote:
Larry Sanger has again written at length about the history of Wikipedia in two articles posted on Slashdot.
Part I : http://features.slashdot.org/features/05/04/18/164213.shtml?tid=95
Part II : http://features.slashdot.org/features/05/04/19/1746205.shtml? tid=95&tid=149&tid=9
Some blogworld commentary is at http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/04/18/ sanger_on_wikipedia.php
- including a follow-up by Sanger, giving his take on the "was he or
wasn't he the co-founder" debate, in particular
"I was virtually always referred to as a co-founder until last year. What has changed?
Wikipedia was my idea (in the very robust sense explained in my memoir), its main founding principles were in large part mine and enforced by me, and I did more than anyone to organize it. It simply would not have existed if I had started it, indeed while being employed by Jimmy. It was on that basis that I was for several years credibly and repeatedly called "co-founder" of the project.
The fact that I was Jimmy's employee, which I freely admit, does not mean I was not also a co-founder of the project.
Until last year, again, this was my honorific, and until this year, nobody has bothered questioning it. I wonder why."
Pete
and
Phil Sandifer wrote:
Hasn't Jimbo indicated a preference for not calling Larry a co-founder?
-Snowspinner
On Apr 19, 2005, at 5:40 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
Pete/Pcb21 wrote:
Larry Sanger has again written at length about the history of Wikipedia in two articles posted on Slashdot.
[snip]
- including a follow-up by Sanger, giving his take on the "was he or
wasn't he the co-founder" debate, in particular
I don't think any reasonable person would object to calling Larry a "co-founder of Wikipedia". To call one troll on a blog comment a "debate" is to blow things extraordinarily out of proportion.
Larry hasn't been involved in the project in some three years (3/4 of its lifetime), and most Wikipedians today have had little or no interaction with Larry. As a result, he's seen now as an outsider, and his criticisms are easily (mis)interpreted as attacks against a community he's not part of.
I've only skimmed these posts, but they seem to boil down to historical trivia ("we had 24 articles not 12!") and saying we should do things that are already on the roadmap (eg, a more formally-vetted release in addition to the rough-and-tumble development Wikipedia).
It'd be nice if people could avoid making a mountain out of a molehill over this. Larry's not our enemy.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
and
Oh wait, that's it. Nothing much that appears to support the "greedy larry" theory.
Oh wait, that's it. Nothing much that appears to support the "greedy larry" theory.
Since, of course, Delirium's e-mail had nothing to do with that.
Delirium wrote:
It's quite clear that Larry Sanger has not put in a minute on Wikipedia for which he was not paid. He resigned and ended all involvement with the project immediately after he stopped receiving a paycheck for it,
So would I have done under the same circumstances. Anything else would indeed have been more strange. When you take employment, you negotiate with your employer to get the right job description, title, and salary, and your negotiation power comes from your ability to walk away. If the employer suddenly cuts your salary, you walk away, and don't continue to do the same work for free. Because if you cannot walk away, you are in fact a slave.
Since Wikipedia was still a .com in 2001, it is fair to include Larry in the number of dotcom layoffs.
Mark Williamson wrote:
It's a good thing you're back, Larry.
I had begun to tire of Phil Sandifer's endless attacks on your character. I don't believe these will continue in your presence.
Welcome back
Mark
Thanks, Mark, but I'm not back. I just joined the list to correct Jimmy on that one point. I don't know who Phil Sandifer is, I don't know what he's been saying, and frankly I don't care. Phil, whoever he is, may carry on! The truth will out, eventually. I am disappointed if I still have such vocal detractors among Wikipedians (that, by the way, would be another one of my coinages--for that matter, I set up this list), but frankly, I'm not surprised, either.
*cackle, cackle*
:-)
--Larry
Mathias Schindler wrote:
(under what license is your text on /., by the way?)
All contributions to *Open Sources 2.0* will be open content/free. I'm not sure what license, precisely; the same one used by *Open Sources*, perhaps, but I never bothered to find out.
--Larry
On 4/20/05, lmsanger@sbcglobal.net lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
But seeing Jimmy's comment impelled me to rejoin the list, for the sole purpose of confirming what has been on record for five years.
Larry, welcome and might I say, how brave of you. :)
As for, "Who was co-founder of Wikipedia?" I'll wait until Jimbo responds.
However, I'd like to challenge some assertions in Part 2 of your Slashdot memoir. You list several alternatives the project could have taken and conclude, "These differences would not have threatened the basic principles that made the project work, listed above." I'm skeptical because you don't provide any proof or logical reasoning to back up the claim, or relate it to accepted scholarship about the nature of commons-based peer production (eg. Coase's Penguin).
These alternatives you stated:
* "For instance, radical openness, that is, being open even to those who brazenly flouted and disrespected the project's mission, was surely not necessary; after all, without them, the project would have been more welcoming to the many people who felt they could not work with such difficult people."
* "And if we had required people to sign in, that would not have made very much difference (although it probably would have made some in the beginning; the project wouldn't have grown as fast)."
* "Of course we didn't have to use the GNU FDL for the license."
* "The project could have officially encouraged and deferred to experts. An article approval process could have been adopted without threatening the principle of posting unedited content for collaboration."
Again, your conclusion was, "These differences would not have threatened the basic principles that made the project work, listed above."
If any of these ideas were floated on the list today, there would be an outcry and threats of desertion by the community. In fact "requiring people to sign in" comes up nearly every month or so on the list and is quashed within a day.
So I'm wondering whether you could elaborate on this, because I found it quite hard to swallow this paragraph as a given.
-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) University of Hong Kong
Link: http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/19/1746205&tid=95&...
Andrew Lih wrote:
As for, "Who was co-founder of Wikipedia?" I'll wait until Jimbo responds.
Opinions about this may differ. It's to some degree a matter of terminology, and I don't particularly care about it one way or the other. I have no desire to see an ongoing storyline of a feud, it's not helpful to anyone.
Larry wrote: "To be clear, the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine..." and that's exactly right, though of course I use the term "free" rather than "open".
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. But he agrees that the idea for the freely licensed collaborative encyclopedia open to contributions by ordinary people was mine, and that NPOV was my idea, and that the investment was mine. That's enough for me. Other people can decide what makes a founder.
I hired Larry to assist with my vision, and he did so competently. 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.
I think people are unfortunately eager to see a war where there isn't one -- at least not from my side. Larry deserves credit for his work, and no less.
--Jimbo
On 4/20/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I think people are unfortunately eager to see a war where there isn't one -- at least not from my side. Larry deserves credit for his work, and no less.
Perhaps that's the Crossfire culture we live in these days. As John Stewart would say, egging this debate on is "hurting Wikipedia."
I'm glad you brought up NPOV vs. unbiased. In the essay, Larry mentions that this newfangled NPOV as a term was unnecessary, as the term unbiased would suffice. I disagree. I'm glad the project uses NPOV and created its own vision for the concept, because journalists in general scoff at the idea of an unbiased writer, reporter or editor. It would make Wikipedia more assailable.
Making NPOV a term the project could define and make its own was a good-thing.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On Wednesday 20 April 2005 02:31, Andrew Lih wrote:
I'm glad you brought up NPOV vs. unbiased.
The term is what it is, though in coming to understand it, and now explain it, it is off. Though, it is off in a useful way, it provides a nice sedgeway into what it *is*. (e.g., "A chickpea is neither a chick nor a pea. Discuss.")
In the essay, Larry mentions that this newfangled NPOV as a term was unnecessary, as the term unbiased would suffice.
Neither is appropriate; rather, without slipping into relativism it abstracts to a meta level of representing what people think they know (i.e., a consensus theory of truth) rather than what is (i.e., a strict objectivist stance.)
http://reagle.org/joseph/2004/agree/wikip-agree.html#heading8 [[[ A misunderstood notion about Wikipedia is that much contention arises from its Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) policy (Wikipedia 2004wnp): that debates arise from this seemingly impossible requirement to remain objectively neutral. Yet, the NPOV policy is quite the opposite and instead recognizes the multitude of viewpoints and provides an epistemic stance in which they all can be recognized as instances of human knowledge – right or wrong. The NPOV policy seeks to achieve the "fair" representation of all sides of the dispute such that all can feel well represented. Articles should explain without advocating, characterize without engaging, and honor the intellectual independence of the readers by refraining from dogmatism. Hence, the clear goal of providing an encyclopedia of all human knowledge explicitly avoids many entanglements. ... Consequently, while the perception is that NPOV is the source of much debate, it may act rather as a heat shield: reducing conflict and otherwise channeling outstanding arguments in the productive context of the primary goal of developing an encyclopedia that is representative of many viewpoints. ... It is important to note that this stance does have important ethical implications. The policy of only reporting on what it is well-known has significant implications for minority views. This is acknowledged and debated within the Wikipedia community and the present norm is that Wikipedia should be fairly representative and proportional to the phenomenon it seeks to capture. ]]]
On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 04:07:47PM -0400, Joseph Reagle wrote:
Neither is appropriate; rather, without slipping into relativism it abstracts to a meta level of representing what people think they know (i.e., a consensus theory of truth) rather than what is (i.e., a strict objectivist stance.)
(above re: NPOV vs. unbiased)
I disagree. NPOV strikes me as an eminently appropriate term. By letting divergent views be heard, and be toned down to largely unbiased language, and coexist within the same blocks of text, a "neutral point of view" is achieved. What, after all, is a more neutral point of view than one that simply includes references to all relevant opposing points of view without judgment between them? That's what we end up with when NPOV policy is diligently observed.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
To Andrew Lih: Andrew, let me throw this back at you: who has ever proven that all of the bulleted items *were* essential to the success of Wikipedia? Why assume without argument that they were? Making unwarranted assumptions is the enemy of critical thinking and problem solving.
--Larry
lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
To Andrew Lih: Andrew, let me throw this back at you: who has ever proven that all of the bulleted items *were* essential to the success of Wikipedia? Why assume without argument that they were? Making unwarranted assumptions is the enemy of critical thinking and problem solving.
The interesting point, to attempt to return this discussion to something useful, is that many of us have slightly different but largely similar theories about which "bullet points" actually were essential to the success of Wikipedia. Larry's list is one which, by and large, I agree with, although I would omit a couple and add a couple of others.
I suppose one might be inclined to wonder if there wasn't some magic in the interaction between my personality and Larry's personality which gave the project a boost in the beginning months and years. Anyone reading these threads can readily discern a difference in style, and of course both styles have value and usefulness in a community project.
Larry, I am not going to respond in detail to your other message, becuase it seems that you're agitated today to the point of taking Pepcid, and I don't mean to upset anyone.
I'll just restate my point, which is that the first person to propose that we move to a wiki system to resolve the problems of Nupedia was Jeremy Rosenfeld. I just think this is an interesting bit of historical trivia which in no way detracts from your _causal_ role in the founding of Wikipedia. I apologize most sincerely if my saying so has upset you; it was not my intention.
(And of course you never opposed _neutrality_, my point was that you never were happy with NPOV _as a technical term to describe a social concept of co-operation_. You said so yourself the other day, and I think that's great.)
--Jimbo
Jimmy wrote:
I'll just restate my point, which is that the first person to propose that we move to a wiki system to resolve the problems of Nupedia was Jeremy Rosenfeld.
What does "propose" mean, then? I suppose you mean he mentioned such an idea to you. Well, so what? That didn't lead to the creation of Wikipedia, did it? You're implying that it did. But it didn't.
I mention *all sorts* of ideas to other people, and other people have mentioned zillions of ideas to me. This doesn't make any such person, somehow, "the first person to propose" the idea, in the sense of being creditable with formulating the project that actually came into being.
And why, again, Jimmy, did you take four years to mention this, if it's worth mentioning at all? Why did you never tell me, or Wikipedians, before? Why is it worth mentioning just now?
I just think this is an interesting bit of historical trivia which in no way detracts from your _causal_ role in the founding of Wikipedia.
But to say that Jeremy Rosenfeld was "the first person to propose" a wiki encyclopedia is precisely to imply, isn't it, that he played the seminal causal role in founding Wikipedia--which is just false. It isn't just "another perspective."
(And of course you never opposed _neutrality_, my point was that you never were happy with NPOV _as a technical term to describe a social concept of co-operation_. You said so yourself the other day, and I think that's great.)
The social concept of co-operation was always my idea of the purpose of the neutrality policy, as well. That was quite explicit in Nupedia's policy statement, drafted by me, as well as the longer statement of Wikipedia's policy on the NPOV page, which I drafted.
I disagree with the exact formulation of the words, "the neutral point of view." I personally advocated everything else about the policy, more strenuously than anyone else did; and if I had not done so, Wikipedia might not now be committed to its neutrality policy.
I apologize most sincerely if my saying so has upset you; it was not my intention.
You don't need to apologize, condescendingly, for upsetting me, Jimmy; obviously, that's just a further insult, as it puts attention on the fact that I am upset. Sure I am. Kind of you to observe that. If I were to say, "Jimmy really had nothing to do with Wikipedia. When I asked him to, he compliantly set up a wiki, and I proceeded to do virtually everything to get the project started and set it up to become a success; he was on the sidelines most of the time; and, of course, he paid me"--you would be upset, too, I suspect. But I do not say this, out of respect.
I am upset, and also disappointed and severely disillusioned. But if for anything, you need to apologize for implying something false, which, if passed around much, would create entirely the wrong impression among your many admirers in the Wikimedia community: "The original idea for a wiki for Wikipedia was not proposed by Larry, but by Jeremy Rosenfeld." That's an apology that I would find valuable.
I see that someone has already made use of your declaration to say something completely wrong on my Wikipedia user page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger
I expect that your perfectly innocent comment will now be repeated, with perfect innocence, to journalists. Then this and other such historical revisionism on your part will help ensure that I will in the future be portrayed as (1) not the person who came up with the idea of Wikipedia, (2) merely and singlehandedly responsible for the "miserable failure" that was Nupedia, and who was fired because it was a failure, (3) on Wikipedia, merely an employee taking orders and not really responsible for any of the policy of the project, (4) opposed to an open project altogether, and (5) opposed to neutrality. That, at least, is how it seems some of my detractors want me to be portrayed, even though my memoir shows every part of it to be outrageously false.
And after this, instead of treating me as a person with a legitimate, well-founded complaint, I imagine that you will respond by implying that I am "upset," and that you "apologize that I am upset." That's mighty big of you, Jimmy.
--Larry The memoir's location again: http://features.slashdot.org/features/05/04/18/164213.shtml http://features.slashdot.org/features/05/04/19/1746205.shtml
lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
Jimmy wrote:
I'll just restate my point, which is that the first person to propose that we move to a wiki system to resolve the problems of Nupedia was Jeremy Rosenfeld.
What does "propose" mean, then? I suppose you mean he mentioned such an idea to you. Well, so what? That didn't lead to the creation of Wikipedia, did it? You're implying that it did. But it didn't.
It means he came to my office and said something to the effect "I know you've complained about the slow process of Nupedia, and I wonder if you've seen this, it's called a wiki. Maybe we could use something like this?"
And why, again, Jimmy, did you take four years to mention this, if it's worth mentioning at all? Why did you never tell me, or Wikipedians, before? Why is it worth mentioning just now?
Well, because we're having this interesting discussion about the history of Wikipedia, and I think it's interesting. There are many interesting stories that could be told, and none of them would in any way detract from your role.
I just think this is an interesting bit of historical trivia which in no way detracts from your _causal_ role in the founding of Wikipedia.
But to say that Jeremy Rosenfeld was "the first person to propose" a wiki encyclopedia is precisely to imply, isn't it, that he played the seminal causal role in founding Wikipedia--which is just false. It isn't just "another perspective."
No, it doesn't imply anything beyond what it says. Jeremy was the first person to propose to me that we use a wiki to solve the problems of Nupedia. That's just a simple plain statement of fact.
You don't need to apologize, condescendingly, for upsetting me, Jimmy; obviously, that's just a further insult, as it puts attention on the fact that I am upset.
Ok, then. I, uh, apologize for apologizing?
It seems you are in a mood to be mad at me no matter what I say, so maybe I better just step away now.
--Jimbo
lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
And why, again, Jimmy, did you take four years to mention this, if it's worth mentioning at all? Why did you never tell me, or Wikipedians, before? Why is it worth mentioning just now?
Since you may not be familiar with general practice here, I should point out that this sort of credit-assignment isn't what we spend most of our time doing. In fact, until you came out of nowhere years after the fact talking about your seminal role in Wikipedia, I don't recall a single discussion taking place on this mailing list about who should get credit in "founding" Wikipedia. Frankly, we have more important things to worry about (such as actually creating an encyclopedia).
For what it's worth, my view on it is that who gets the credit is pretty meaningless. As can be seen by the fact that many people suggested it, the idea of a wiki-based encyclopedia by the time Wikipedia was started was becoming fairly obvious, so eventually someone had to start it. If you were the first one to actually bite the bullet and do so, great, but I don't particularly care.
Look, you have not been a part of the Wikipedia community since early 2002, and now you reappear three years later talking about your importance in the "founding" of Wikipedia, pimping a book, and writing screeds about what's wrong with it while at the same time not actually participating in any of the policy discussions, and indeed explicitly saying you "don't have time" to actually discuss any of the issues [1]. Even your brief reappearance here is apparently entirely to defend your claimed credit, not to actually discuss how to improve Wikipedia, an endeavor in which you claim to be interested.
If your view is that you're some sort of god-king who can write screeds that then get implemented without dirtying your hands with the business of discussing the best course of action with us common folk, then I think you're mistaken. If you're just trying to pump up sales for your book or get some sort of a tenure-track position, well, carry on.
-Mark
[1] http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2004/12/30/142458/25/194#194 -- "I don't have time to reply to the many comments on this forum."
On 4/20/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
For what it's worth, my view on it is that who gets the credit is pretty meaningless. As can be seen by the fact that many people suggested it, the idea of a wiki-based encyclopedia by the time Wikipedia was started was becoming fairly obvious, so eventually someone had to start it.
I think this comment (which Bjarte Sorensen also made, in different words) bears repeating, and expanding upon. The way in which the concept of wikis grew slowly for years and then boomed (take a look around, they're everywhere now) suggests to me that they were "an idea whose time had come". It also seems reasonable that Wikipedia itself was an idea whose time had come - being, as it was, the culmination of all sorts of attempts at an online encyclopedia, of which Nupedia was a drop in the ocean (see, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_encyclopedia_project)
As such, I think the problem we are all struggling with is this: -> "What does it mean to 'create' an idea?" Like "Who invented the telephone?" the question of "Who invented Wikipedia?" may be best viewed as an unanswerable question, as it is simply too easy to redefine. Thus Larry is defining it in such a way that the answer is "Larry", and Jimbo is defining it in such a way that the answer is "Jeremy, and Jimbo, and also Larry". Obviously, if you assume these are answering the same question, they are conflicting answers; but it seems to me that they're not.
BTW, I now notice, after already drafting most of the above, that [[Telephone]] on Wikipedia includes this statement:
It is important to note that there is no "inventor of the telephone." The modern telephone is the result of work done by many hands, all worthy of recognition of their addition to the field. <
I couldn't have put it any better myself.
Which brings me to my next point - note the phrase "all worthy of recognition". If you accept my reasoning that "who created Wikipedia?" is a meaningless question, then you can see that the key point is how we frame things. Nobody is denying that Larry had an extremely important role in the early development of Wikipedia; and nobody is claiming that Jeremy had more than a fleeting role in the idea. So, the following should, I think, be uncontroversial:
* Jeremy and Larry both independently had the idea of using a wiki to replace or complement Nupedia. * They both mentionned this to Jimbo, who felt this better matched his original "vision" * It was Larry, however, that saw the idea through, and who was extremely important in the early development of Wikipedia * It is Jimbo who has stuck through, and worked on the project from before it began to the present day
But the million-dollar question is apparently "was Larry a co-founder?". I'd say "yes", in that he was part of the core that made it happen. The problem is, if somebody came along just days after the wiki was "switched on", and became an influential part of the decision-making process, were they also a "co-founder"? Again, the question is hard to frame. [I wasn't "there" anywhere near the time, I should point out, so I am being purely hypothetical]
My conclusion? "Jimbo Wales had a vision for a free online encyclopedia; he and his employee Larry Sanger worked up Nupedia as a first stab at this vision; after hearing about wikis - which Jimbo had also recently discussed with another employee, Jeremy Rosenfeld - Larry laid down the first strokes of what would become Wikipedia."
Sorry this has turned into such a ramble, but I hope it is of some value to someone.
On 4/20/05, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/20/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
For what it's worth, my view on it is that who gets the credit is pretty meaningless. As can be seen by the fact that many people suggested it, the idea of a wiki-based encyclopedia by the time Wikipedia was started was becoming fairly obvious, so eventually someone had to start it.
I think this comment (which Bjarte Sorensen also made, in different words) bears repeating, and expanding upon. The way in which the concept of wikis grew slowly for years and then boomed (take a look around, they're everywhere now) suggests to me that they were "an idea whose time had come". It also seems reasonable that Wikipedia itself was an idea whose time had come - being, as it was, the culmination of all sorts of attempts at an online encyclopedia, of which Nupedia was a drop in the ocean (see, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_encyclopedia_project)
As such, I think the problem we are all struggling with is this: -> "What does it mean to 'create' an idea?" Like "Who invented the telephone?" the question of "Who invented Wikipedia?" may be best viewed as an unanswerable question, as it is simply too easy to redefine. Thus Larry is defining it in such a way that the answer is "Larry", and Jimbo is defining it in such a way that the answer is "Jeremy, and Jimbo, and also Larry". Obviously, if you assume these are answering the same question, they are conflicting answers; but it seems to me that they're not.
BTW, I now notice, after already drafting most of the above, that [[Telephone]] on Wikipedia includes this statement:
It is important to note that there is no "inventor of the telephone." The modern telephone is the result of work done by many hands, all worthy of recognition of their addition to the field. <
I couldn't have put it any better myself.
Which brings me to my next point - note the phrase "all worthy of recognition". If you accept my reasoning that "who created Wikipedia?" is a meaningless question, then you can see that the key point is how we frame things. Nobody is denying that Larry had an extremely important role in the early development of Wikipedia; and nobody is claiming that Jeremy had more than a fleeting role in the idea. So, the following should, I think, be uncontroversial:
- Jeremy and Larry both independently had the idea of using a wiki to
replace or complement Nupedia.
- They both mentionned this to Jimbo, who felt this better matched his
original "vision"
- It was Larry, however, that saw the idea through, and who was
extremely important in the early development of Wikipedia
- It is Jimbo who has stuck through, and worked on the project from
before it began to the present day
But the million-dollar question is apparently "was Larry a co-founder?". I'd say "yes", in that he was part of the core that made it happen. The problem is, if somebody came along just days after the wiki was "switched on", and became an influential part of the decision-making process, were they also a "co-founder"? Again, the question is hard to frame. [I wasn't "there" anywhere near the time, I should point out, so I am being purely hypothetical]
My conclusion? "Jimbo Wales had a vision for a free online encyclopedia; he and his employee Larry Sanger worked up Nupedia as a first stab at this vision; after hearing about wikis - which Jimbo had also recently discussed with another employee, Jeremy Rosenfeld - Larry laid down the first strokes of what would become Wikipedia."
Sorry this has turned into such a ramble, but I hope it is of some value to someone. --
Thanks, Rowan. I found this very helpful.
-- Rich Holton
[[W:en:User:Rholton]]
Richard Holton wrote:
My conclusion? "Jimbo Wales had a vision for a free online encyclopedia;
he and his
employee Larry Sanger worked up Nupedia as a first stab at this vision; after hearing about wikis - which Jimbo had also recently discussed with another employee, Jeremy Rosenfeld - Larry laid down the first strokes of what would become Wikipedia."
Sorry this has turned into such a ramble, but I hope it is of some value to someone. --
Thanks, Rowan. I found this very helpful.
Yes, it sounds very reasonable--for someone who wasn't there. Unfortunately, it is still very misleading.
Since I was there and I know precisely how it started, apparently unlike *ANYBODY* writing about this subject here, let me rewrite your conclusion:
"Jimbo Wales had a vision for a free online encyclopedia; he hired Larry Sanger to be the project's editor-in-chief, and he, with a voluntary advisory board, worked up Nupedia as a first stab at this vision. There were problems with Nupedia's system, which Larry was tasked to solve. Larry heard about wikis one evening over dinner and the very next day, or the day after, as a direct and sole result, laid down the first strokes of what would become Wikipedia. Jimmy said later, in 2005, as an interesting bit of historical trivia, that someone else first suggested a wiki encyclopedia to him. This suggestion, however, had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the origination of Wikipedia, nor did Jimmy mean to suggest that it did."
That would not be misleading. I mean, of course Jimmy did not mean to suggest that Jeremy Rosenfeld's saying anything to him actually *led to* the creation of Wikipedia, did he? I'm not sure Jimmy has been perfectly clear about this point.
What some people seem to want to be true is this: "Jeremy Rosenfeld got the idea for Wikipedia, which he conveyed to Jimmy. Jimmy then told Larry to start it, which he did." That is completely false. No:
"Larry got the idea; Larry asked Jimmy to set up the wiki software on the server, which he (or Jason Richey) did; then Larry got to work."
I noticed that someone has put the following words into my mouth on my user page,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger
"My name is Larry Sanger. I was Jimbo Wales' employee when Jeremy Rosenfeld had the idea to start the encyclopedia, and the first (and so far only) editor-in-chief of Nupedia."
I am not going to get into an edit war with some person who knows nothing about what he is trying to make me say. Will someone please revert the page? Thanks in advance.
--Larry (unsubscribing now, hopefully)
On 4/20/05 9:01 PM, "lmsanger@sbcglobal.net" lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
Yes, it sounds very reasonable--for someone who wasn't there. Unfortunately, it is still very misleading.
Since I was there and I know precisely how it started, apparently unlike *ANYBODY* writing about this subject here, let me rewrite your conclusion:
"Jimbo Wales had a vision for a free online encyclopedia; he hired Larry Sanger to be the project's editor-in-chief, and he, with a voluntary advisory board, worked up Nupedia as a first stab at this vision. There were problems with Nupedia's system, which Larry was tasked to solve. Larry heard about wikis one evening over dinner and the very next day, or the day after, as a direct and sole result, laid down the first strokes of what would become Wikipedia. Jimmy said later, in 2005, as an interesting bit of historical trivia, that someone else first suggested a wiki encyclopedia to him. This suggestion, however, had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the origination of Wikipedia, nor did Jimmy mean to suggest that it did."
Gotta love Larry.
One bit of historical footnoting--while Larry may have had reservations about the term NPOV, he did work to codify it, writing a (in my opinion) hard-to-parse, discursive formulation of the "neutral point of view" policy, which I tried to help clarify, but which he took umbrage at.
He was getting a bit personal by the end. This is the type of dialogue which Larry and I engaged in soon before he left the project:
Me: "LMS: I'm not trying to act as a check on your rampant authority." LMS: "Like hell you aren't. It's your purpose in life on Wikipedia. It's what you live for."
One thing he didn't note in his history is that "Is Wikipedia an experiment in anarchy?" was written as a direct response to what he perceived as my destructive behavior (to wit: "But I'm going to write an essay that goes to what I see as being the heart of the matter behind Cunctator's repeated disruptions of Wikipedia.").
For some reason (and I think we see this again now) LMS perceived arguments against his actions as attacks on his person. He strongly believed I had a vendetta against him, even though I repeatedly said I didn't. And I don't.
Some useful history on the personality/decision-tree conflicts can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:The_Cunctator/Bias_Talk
On 4/21/05, lmsanger@sbcglobal.net lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
Richard Holton wrote:
My conclusion? "Jimbo Wales had a vision for a free online encyclopedia;
he and his
employee Larry Sanger worked up Nupedia as a first stab at this vision; after hearing about wikis - which Jimbo had also recently discussed with another employee, Jeremy Rosenfeld - Larry laid down the first strokes of what would become Wikipedia."
Yes, it sounds very reasonable--for someone who wasn't there. Unfortunately, it is still very misleading.
I'm sorry you think so. Let's work on it:
"Jimbo Wales had a vision for a free online encyclopedia; he hired Larry Sanger to be the project's editor-in-chief, and he, with a voluntary advisory board, worked up Nupedia as a first stab at this vision. There were problems with Nupedia's system, which Larry was tasked to solve. Larry heard about wikis one evening over dinner and the very next day, or the day after, as a direct and sole result, laid down the first strokes of what would become Wikipedia. Jimmy said later, in 2005, as an interesting bit of historical trivia, that someone else first suggested a wiki encyclopedia to him. This suggestion, however, had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the origination of Wikipedia, nor did Jimmy mean to suggest that it did."
This version simply says the same thing, with more detail. OK, so it's obviously not *exactly* the same, but it boils down to much the same thing, IMHO.
What some people seem to want to be true is this: "Jeremy Rosenfeld got the idea for Wikipedia, which he conveyed to Jimmy. Jimmy then told Larry to start it, which he did." That is completely false. No:
That is certainly *not* what *my* "conclusion" said, although people do seem to have got that impression from other parts of the discussion.
"Larry got the idea; Larry asked Jimmy to set up the wiki software on the server, which he (or Jason Richey) did; then Larry got to work."
The only thing I was trying to add to this was the fact - reflected in your "memoir", unless I'm misunderstanding it - that you had to "sell" the new idea to Jimmy after your epiphanous dinner. It is therefore historically important that he accepted it; you suggest that "After he had nixed my several earlier proposals, and given that setting up a wiki would be very simple and require hiring no programmer, Jimmy could scarcely refuse".
Is it not possible - indeed likely, unless Jimmy is actually lying - that the fact that he had discussed a similar concept with someone else *helped warm him to the idea*? And if so, does that conversation not have a small bearing on the existence of the wiki - not as an agent in making it happen, or shaping it, but like a Butterfly Effect; a small event which may have just been coincidence, but seems notable with hindsight.
So perhaps: "Larry got the idea; Larry told Jimmy about it; Jimmy had discussed something similar with Jeremy Rosenfeld, but not in any detail; Larry talked Jimmy into setting it up; then Larry got to work."
Or, in the style of my original "conclusion": "Jimbo Wales had a vision for a free online encyclopedia; he hired Larry Sanger to oversee the project, who - together with a team of volunteers - worked up Nupedia as a first stab at this vision. While thinking of ways to solve problems with Nupedia's current model, Larry heard about wikis over dinner with Ben Kovitz and came up with the idea of a wiki-based encyclopedia. Larry suggested this to Jimmy (who, coincidentally, had once discussed something vaguely similar with Jeremy Rosenfeld) and was given the go-ahead. Larry then proceeded to lay down the first strokes of what would become Wikipedia."
Or, finally, I quite like the current wording in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia (although it doesn't mention, as Jimmy now has, that Jeremy literally suggested a wiki-encyclopedia): "On the evening of 2 January 2001, Sanger had a conversation over dinner with Ben Kovitz, a computer programmer, in San Diego, California. Kovitz, who was a regular on "Ward's Wiki" (the Portland Pattern Repository), explained the wiki concept to Sanger. Sanger saw that a wiki would be an excellent format whereby a more open, less formal encyclopedia project could be pursued. Sanger easily persuaded Wales, who had been introduced to the wiki concept previously, to set up a wiki for Nupedia, and Nupedia's first wiki went online on 10 January."
Rowan Collins wrote:
As such, I think the problem we are all struggling with is this: -> "What does it mean to 'create' an idea?" Like "Who invented the telephone?" the question of "Who invented Wikipedia?" may be best viewed as an unanswerable question, as it is simply too easy to redefine. Thus Larry is defining it in such a way that the answer is "Larry", and Jimbo is defining it in such a way that the answer is "Jeremy, and Jimbo, and also Larry".
Just to be clear, I'm not making any sort of claim or definition about that at all. I've just reported on an interesting bit of historical trivia.
Nobody is denying that Larry had an extremely important role in the early development of Wikipedia; and nobody is claiming that Jeremy had more than a fleeting role in the idea.
Precisely.
--Jimbo
On 4/20/05, lmsanger@sbcglobal.net lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
To Andrew Lih: Andrew, let me throw this back at you: who has ever proven that all of the bulleted items *were* essential to the success of Wikipedia? Why assume without argument that they were? Making unwarranted assumptions is the enemy of critical thinking and problem solving.
You were the one who wrote the memoir and put forth the assertions without supporting argument, and it's up to me to prove the negative? It seems the "critical thinking" lapse is not on my end. I simply asked you to elaborate on them, because they're contrary to current community norms that are quite widely attributed as the reasons for the project's success.
My question is - are you familiar with Benkler's "Coase's Penguin" and his thoughts about peer production? Have you tried to compare your views on "anti-elitism" and "make special roles for experts from the very beginning" against current scholarship on the operation of open source projects and commons-based peer production? I'd be interested to hear your insight, because I do think you could add much to the field. And since you are in academia, and an important part of the history of Wikipedia, it is a natural extension of that area of scholarship. It would be great to see the next Slashdot or Kur5hin article be, "On commons-based peer production, by the co-founder of Wikipedia "
Despite the many Wikipedian villagers with torches and pitchforks running you out of town, I'd find it eminently more useful if you stayed and engaged in dialogue, on a whole range of issues:
* the socio-psychological rewards of participation, something I haven't seen addressed much in your writings * jealousy/altruism factor in Microsoft's Encarta's recent "wiki-like" adaptation, which is more like Nupedia's model and has a regard for experts in the final review process * the sifting process, which you were a part of, and has gained more momentum in recent months
-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)
I don't know why Jimbo would do that, Larry. But I do know that Jimbo has been putting a tremendous amount of work into this community and this project. I know that h e's been active from a level ranging from the broad fundraising level to an astonishing level of specificity as he deals with individual problems. I know he's been fast to respond to queries, reasonable, judicious, and nothing but respectful.
I also know that the only time I see your name of late is attached to another screed about why the project you abandoned is doomed. Curiously, it seems to keep climbing in the Alexa rankings while you claim that. Equally curiously, it took you a few years yourself to change from leaving because you weren't getting paid anymore to leaving because of a poisonous social atmosphere.
My point here being that, all things being equal, when it comes to Jimbo's word against yours, I'm going to go with Jimbo. And when it comes to taking seriously critiques of the project, I'm going to go with people who are involved in it, instead of capitalizing on their past involvement to hit the frontpage of the geek news sites.
Now go take your drama queening somewhere else. We're busy with this project. You may remember it. It's called Wikipedia.
-Snowspinner
On Apr 19, 2005, at 10:10 PM, lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
I was looking at wikipedia-l to see how the community might react to my memoir. I haven't been subscribed for three years. But seeing Jimmy's comment impelled me to rejoin the list, for the sole purpose of confirming what has been on record for five years.
Jimmy wrote:
The original idea for a wiki for Wikipedia was not proposed by Larry, but by Jeremy Rosenfeld.
Who is Jeremy Rosenfeld? I'm afraid I don't remember, but I don't have a very good memory for names. Was he one of the people doing link weeding for Bomis?
I remember very clearly the evening when I got the idea for Wikipedia. It was January 2 and Ben Kovitz and I were eating at a Mexican restaurant just around the corner from the old Bomis office. (I could point out the place, if it still exists, but I forget the name.) Ben no doubt remembers it as well, because I told him almost immediately after he explained the concept of a wiki to me that it would be interesting to consider building a more free-wheeling encyclopedia project using a wiki. I told him that, even as we were still eating dinner. I remember writing a wiki encyclopedia proposal soon after I got home, I think that very night; I remember you saying that you liked the idea and that you'd set up the wiki. That would have been January 3. I think you (or maybe it was Jason Richey) actually put the wiki online either that day or the next. I think it was that very day, because I remember being happy that the thing had been set up so quickly. Over the next few days I started populating the wiki with the basic pages, and pitched the idea to Nupedia.
If Jeremy Rosenfeld told you about wikis, or suggested that wiki software could be used to run a wiki encyclopedia, you certainly never told *me* that; and in any case, it was not Jeremy Rosenfeld's conversation with you, but instead mine, that actually caused the precursor of Wikipedia to come into existence on January 3 or 4. I know how Wikipedia was originated, since, well, I did the origination. Moreover, I came up with the name for the project and shepherded it very closely from then through its first year.
Do you deny these claims, Jimmy?
If not, then what you say is simply false, is it not?--That "The original idea for a wiki for Wikipedia was not proposed by Larry, but by Jeremy Rosenfeld."
I just don't know what you could possibly thinking. Why don't you clarify for the list what you meant, precisely, in light of the facts as I have presented them? Surely you're not accusing *me* of having lied since practically the beginning of the project? Because, as you know, the above story has been the official story of the origin of the idea for Wikipedia since the beginning of the project. Why would you take five years to "set the record straight" and thereby accuse me of having been a liar all that time?
--Larry
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Phil Sandifer wrote:
My point here being that, all things being equal, when it comes to Jimbo's word against yours, I'm going to go with Jimbo.
Yes, but please let's not have it be about that. I have only very very minor quibbles with Larry's history (well, I haven't read it all yet). He seemed to think I was accusing him of lying earlier, but that's clearly just a misunderstanding.
If he doesn't remember me saying "Oh, yes, wiki, Jeremy showed me this last month" (or whatever I said, but I did say something like this) -- this is not a discredit to him. He says he doesn't even remember Jeremy, after all. :-)
--Jimbo
Larry should be given credit for staying on as a volunteer for a long as he did and for advocating his positions in good faith.
There was a poisonous athmosphere which surrounded Larry as he tried to whip us into shape. Part of the problem is that he was breaking rules (assume good faith, be courteous, avoid personal attacks) at the same time he was enforcing them (no personal research (in my case at least)).
It is not surprising that he lost patience, most of us have at one point or another.
I can remember having real fear that he would manage to put in some authoritarian system that would destroy the openness of the project.
I guess, bottom line, if you think that sort of stuff works, you should go and do it.
But of course it does work, it is called academia and is very well funded, but generally lacks an internet presence. There is no Harvard or Yale or even Oxford encyclopedia. Perhaps there ought to be. But how do you translate the undoubted expertise of $200,000 a year professors into freely accessible knowledge?
It is academia which dropped the ball, we just found it laying out on the highway.
Fred
From: Phil Sandifer sandifer@sbcglobal.net Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 23:37:44 -0500 To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Sanger's memoirs
Equally curiously, it took you a few years yourself to change from leaving because you weren't getting paid anymore to leaving because of a poisonous social atmosphere.
Honestly, this mailing list thread about a "Sanger/Wales war" is very overblown. Larry, perhaps it is that title which has you uptight?
I just don't know what you could possibly thinking. Why don't you clarify for the list what you meant, precisely, in light of the facts as I have presented them? Surely you're not accusing *me* of having lied since practically the beginning of the project?
Gee, settle down. I'm not accusing anyone of lying about anything. I'm just adding an interesting bit of historical trivia.
In mid-December, Jeremy showed me Ward Cunningham's wiki and suggested it would be a possible solution for the constant complaints he was aware of that I had about your top-down-community design for Nupedia. When you showed me the same thing a few weeks later, that was great.
--Jimbo
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
On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 07:35:23AM -0400, lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
[snip]
After everything that both you and Jimbo have said in this discussion so far, Larry, it looks to me like he has a not invalid perspective on the matter that perhaps grants you slightly less credit than other not invalid perspectives might, but that you in turn are presenting your own perspective that gathers more credit to you than most of these perspectives would grant. If you want to have a less stressful and more productive discussion than you've been having, I'd recommend aiming for a middle ground somewhere.
Every single point of dispute you've brought up so far looks like nothing more than a difference in perspective, and thus a difference in terminology used comes into being. I don't think anyone has to be a liar for the other to be right from his given perspective in this matter. I think it's much more likely that, in your excitement over the idea of a wiki-based encyclopedia, you missed Jimbo's offhand comment about someone else that you apparently didn't know well enough to even remember having mentioned wikis as a model for encyclopedia development.
I prefer to think that neither of you are lying, and there's a simple, easy, reasonable explanation for how all this disagreement might have arisen from nothing but a difference of perspective. In fact, the very existence of this disagreement as it is occurring seems further evidence that it's nothing but a difference in perspective, from where I'm sitting, because Jimbo is trying to point out where the two of you have a difference of perspective and you're arguing that only one of you can be right. This seems to be a fairly good indicator that, from Jimbo's perspective, what you called amicable discussion he might have seen as arguments that he let you win back in the days of Nupedia. You seem argumentative to me, on this, and if your social proclivities run this way I'm not surprised that Jimbo would have called policy discussions "argument", even if you did not -- and if he "let [you] win" these arguments, whether for the peace or for reason of coming to agree with you, I'm not surprised that you might have seen the exercise as being more agreeable and less argumentative.
So, again, perhaps you should aim to balance biases, perspectives -- points of view -- in this matter. Try to see the other guy's side of things. From what I've seen here, it looks like Jimbo is doing so already, though he clearly doesn't feel constrained to adopt your view as his own, which is fine: he does seem quite willing to acknowledge that you have a valid perspective, though, while you insist on failing to acknowledge the same about his perspective. That, I think, is what sustains this unnecessary debate, and it suggests immediately to me how to smooth the troubled waters: see, acknowledge, and respect the differing perspective.
You know -- like an NPOV solution, despise the term though you might.
Then again, that could just be me.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
--- lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
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.
Hi Larry - As one of the few people left that was here while you were still around on Wikipedia, I�d just like to say that I think your contribution to the project during its first year was invaluable - vital even. As I said shortly after you posted your letter of resignation, I feel that you were the main person that held things together long enough for the community to be strong and oriented enough to take care of things on its own. That fact is, IMO, vastly more important than who did or did not think of the idea of Wikipedia first.
At the time of your resignation you didn�t seem be as optimistic about Wikipedia�s future as I was, however, saying that more paid editors like yourself would be needed to make sure the project would not go awry (IIRC).
From that point our views have diverged, but that does not diminish the high
regard I - and I suspect many others - have for what you did.
-- mav
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Daniel Mayer wrote:
Hi Larry - As one of the few people left that was here while you were still around on Wikipedia, I’d just like to say that I think your contribution to the project during its first year was invaluable - vital even. As I said shortly after you posted your letter of resignation, I feel that you were the main person that held things together long enough for the community to be strong and oriented enough to take care of things on its own.
Please allow me to enthusiastically second this.
--Jimbo
lmsanger@sbcglobal.net wrote:
I remember very clearly the evening when I got the idea for Wikipedia. It was January 2 and Ben Kovitz and I were eating at a Mexican restaurant just around the corner from the old Bomis office. (I could point out the place, if it still exists, but I forget the name.)
We should hang a gilded plaque there and make it a place of pilgrimage, obviously. (Especially since San Diego in January is a nice escape from northern climates.) That doesn't mean it need to be the only such place. Such dates and places are the best we have, because we can seldom explain exactly how, when or why certain thoughts came into our heads.
As I described in my 2002 paper (aronsson.se/wikipaper.html) I think I first learned of wikis when the Seattle Wireless wiki was slashdotted on March 22, 2001. However, a programming colleague of mine (Pär Fornland) has later reminded me that he tried to make me grasp the concept of c2.com already in 1999/2000. It is quite possible that this early input was resting in my subconscious and provided a necessary fertile soil for the impressions I received in the spring of 2001. (I don't keep detailed records of all impressions and ideas, but maybe I should. I have this idea of an always-on digital video camera on my eyeglasses, so I can go back and search and replay any earlier part of my life.)
Hi Larry, everybody,
Who is Jeremy Rosenfeld? I'm afraid I don't remember[...] Was he one of the people doing link weeding for Bomis?
Yup!
It was January 2 and Ben Kovitz and I were eating at a Mexican restaurant just around the corner from the old Bomis office. (I could point out the place, if it still exists, but I forget the name.)
At the time, it was Taco Express #2, but I think it's something different now.
Ted
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