[WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales

[Delirium]

Larry Sanger wrote:
> I can recognize when I am no longer welcome.  I didn't really believe I ever
> was welcome to begin with, but I was willing to try.  I've always been
> optimistic.
> 
> I assume that, since the self-appointed silencers among you are apparently
> operating with impunity, I could not possibly continue to press my case here
> without continuing to cause an uproar among them.  So I will stop.  Those
> who wanted to silence me have done so successfully, just as your fearless
> leader did on [[User talk:Jimmy Wales]].

For what it's worth, I don't think you're actually nearly as unwelcome 
here as you seem to think. If you have meta-level proposals you want to 
advance --- Wikipedia should change X because of Y --- I think people 
would take them seriously, especially if there was a concrete, 
potentially workable proposal. Such proposals would at the very least 
spark discussion.

It's just that nobody wants to debate "who founded Wikipedia" on this 
list. We don't even necessarily all disagree with you on the subject. 
But it's not clear what gain will be had by debating it here, or what 
the outcome is supposed to be. Lots of people saying they agree? I don't 
actually think Jimmy would get a much more favorable reaction if he 
started trying to debate similar issues here, either.

I think you might also be aiming at the wrong audience to some extent. 
You seem to accept the media-narrative "founder myth" of Wikipedia as 
this thing that sprang whole cloth out of nothingness due to the 
ingenuity of Jimmy Wales; save only that you'd like to modify the credit 
to include Larry Sanger in an equally or more prominent role. But my 
impression is that this is mainly an external view. Most of the 
knowledgeable Wikipedians I know take a more complex view, crediting to 
various degrees: Ward Cunningham's development of wikis; the development 
of community and social norms on WikiWikiWeb and MeatballWiki; the 
expansion of subject-specific wiki encyclopedias from the original 
design-patterns-encyclopedia focus of WikiWikiWeb to cover ever more 
areas of knowledge; the parallel cropping up of non-wiki "all human 
knowledge written by random people on the internet" compendia like 
Everything2; and so on. You and Jimmy were among many actors in that sea 
of ideas; what precise credit is due to each such actor for developing 
those ideas or accelerating their spread and recombination is probably a 
matter for historians more than us. But on the whole if you want a 
bigger role in a simplified founding saga, you might be addressing the 
wrong audience if many of us don't believe in the saga to begin with. =]

-Mark