[WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Larry Sanger wrote:
>> It is not pointless to get the record corrected and to hold our leaders to
>> high standards of honesty.  This may require courage, but it is essential to
>> having a truly open, transparent community that has any chance of deserving
>> the label "democratic."
>>
> One thing about history and Wikipedia, is that we are supposed to let
> historians write it. Really, if you are asking me personally to choose
> between your version of history, and what you say is Jimbo's, I would
> prefer a third-party, dispassionate account.  So much for history.  If
> you also want to advocate for something else, relative to the Wikipedia
> community, go ahead.  This comment is so obviously policised and
> personalised, that I'd prefer to keep a clear wall between it and the
> "foundation myth".
>
> Charles

I agree totally with Charles, here. When "How Wikipedia Works" goes
into its 23rd printing :) hopefully we will be able to rely on other
people's dispassionate sifting of the historical record (what there is
of it; much of what is disputed is over what was said in personal
conversations, though seemingly not much public effort has been made
so far to find out what the other parties in those conversations
think). Larry and Jimmy are not the only early Wikipedians, and
someday hopefully there will be a better detailed history of the whole
endeavor in the black-hole, missing-edit-history years. (I can see
this being printed by one of those obscure university presses, on
thick paper with extensive footnotes...) In the meantime, of course,
the public will continue to learn about the project through the news
and their own searches, as they always have, and the rest of us will
go about our business.

The Wikipedia story is not exciting because of any single person's
contributions to the projects; it's the aggregate over time that
matters, and outside of the larger context of the project, none of our
contributions (no matter how much, or how little) are worth much.
(Founding doesn't mean much if other people don't run with it; and
contributing to a wiki doesn't get you very far if others don't also
build the web). But this is not a negative aspect -- as Andrew Lih
said at the end of "The Wikipedia Revolution," we are _all_ lucky to
have been a part of such a revolutionary project, and we should all
take personal pride in that.

-- phoebe