On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@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