[WikiEN-l] An open letter to Jimmy Wales

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:04:20 -0700, Delirium wrote:

> 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.

... and Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web; the ARPAnet 
pioneers for creating the network on which the Web operated; Ted 
Nelson for inventing hypertext;  Xerox PARC for creating the elements 
of the modern user interface that Apple stole from them and Microsoft 
stole from Apple; the original IBM PC development team for creating 
the PC platform which brought personal computers into the mainstream 
and made it possible for the Internet and Web to be a mass medium; 
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs for showing that home computers were a 
reasonable idea in the first place; the developers of the Altair 
computer for showing that computers didn't have to be huge million-
dollar hulks; the pioneers of mainframe computers for creating those 
million-dollar hulks in the first place and letting computer science 
begin as a discipline of knowledge; Edison and/or Tesla for making 
electricity ubiquitous and all those later devices possible; Ben 
Franklin for making discoveries about electricity the later inventors 
could build on.... and so on and on and on.  Everybody builds on the 
discoveries and inventions of those who came before.


-- 
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