Wikipedians/History talk

I don't want to spoil your fun (and this is admittedly lots of fun :-) ), but I suspect this page is a bad idea. It encourages the idea that we ought to distinguish ourselves based on our seniority, as opposed to our ability to write good articles, which is what really matters. I think we ought to do our best to underemphasize seniority, which can be used, often illegitimately, as a way of deciding who to accord how much respect. Of course, sometimes how long someone has been here does bear on, for example, how well they understand Wikipedia policy and why Wikipedia works as it does. But it doesn't bear on much else.

For "historical" purposes :-) , perhaps we should each keep a record on our own personal pages of when we arrived. That should do the trick, eh? Having the data all on one page invites comparison, thus the above-mentioned problem. --LMS

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Its kind of wierd for me because I wrote some stuff long before I saw the light and became a "member". Its kind of an elitist thing to be able to put yourself before a bunch of people on the list, but I honestly can't remember! I first made an entry when it showed up on that banner on http://www.bomis.com. When would that be roughly? Does anyone know? --Alan D

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One more thing to add to what I wrote above. C'mon guys, let's not take ourselves too damn seriously. Sure, Wikipedia might take over the world of encyclopedias. Yes, it's possible. But nobody knows how probable it is, and frankly, given what an unusual thing that would be, I have to grudgingly admit that it's pretty damn improbable. Besides, I don't see a great need to do 24th century historians' work for them. Heck, by then, artificial intelligence will be able to construct the database in a millisecond, based on ancient, archived personal pages.

Besides all that, I really do think the only reason why this page is so much fun is precisely that it sort of creates a pecking order of sorts. Let us resist that as much as possible. --LMS

Actually, I suspect that Wikipedia may very well become the king of encyclopaedias. It has everything it needs (even the almost Borgia-like internecine power struggles) to make it this: a committed and dedicated and growing band of serious contributors, a fast and reliable search engine, and is rapidly becoming encyclopaedic in scope. Given that we have gone from 0 - 15k articles within the first ten months (and the rate of work is increasing and not decreasing) we will have an extrapolated 40k articles by next summer.

As a historian, one of my biggest problem 99.9% of the time is attribution of sources. I hate to think of the great debates looming 100 years down the road about the History of Wikipedia if we don't capture precisely this sort of information in a fairly sensible fashion. Certainly, with a port across to Magnus' new implementation imminent, (and others as we go along) can we be certain that a full revision history for every article will be available, for example? All information is important: attribution is paramount. sjc