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History of Wikipedia

From Meta-Wikipedia, discussion about the Free Encyclopedia

History of wikipedia - very rough and still contains POV statements - add what you can, but avoid removing anything until we can spend time cleaning up. History is hard. It requires patience. Avoid settling on any dogma, and be careful about adjectives and such. An early Muslim view of history might be helpful to those of you who don't have much experience writing history itself.

Prehistory

Primordial Soup

Expansion

Controversy

Political controversy became a major focus of editorial policy in mid-2002 - Larry Sanger returned after his resignation to wade in to the following:

In March 2002, the user "24" (named after his internet address) began to make a large number of controversial edits many perceived as left-wing or simply idiosyncratic; heated discussions with him lead to personal attacks and insults and Jimbo Wales banned his IP from the site for two days in April 2002 after lengthy debate on the mailing list - he never returned although some believe he has been active anonymously since. His many contributions remain visible on the meta site - as does much of his text in the main wikipedia, suggesting the controversy was not so much a matter of content as style, and ideological posturing on both sides: 24 famously denied that Wikipedia was or could ever be a 'community' which angered some very longtime Wikipedians.

"Helga", who had persistently made controversial edits to pages related to German history, which were perceived as right-wing by most, and which were lamented by Wikipedia's historians, was IP-banned in September 2002, again after discussion on the mailing list. Much less of her text remains in the wikipedia, and she made no contributions to the meta site anyone deemed worthwhile.

Some believe that the controversy was inevitable, as the wikipedia began to exhaust non-controversial subject matter, such as the hard sciences and well-documented European history, and began to cover more difficult issues where multiple points of view fiercely competing for attention is normal: the many views of economics, ethics and its applications (only the simplest view seems to lead to any agreement), sociology, Islam and its implications in politics, psychology, law and legal codes, political science and of course politics itself. The correlation between numbers of articles on these questions and the level of controversy has not been explored. One constructive suggestion that came from this period was that Wikipedia recruit a board to make major editorial decisions for the project.

However, there was and is no official or central way to make editorial decisions after Larry. In general, historical and ideological controversy has been dealt with since fall 2002 by informal means, e.g. Talk files, more careful policy, and less use of judgemental language, when intent has not been proven - but a lot of users have been IP-banned since, for much lesser offenses, without being permitted to make the amount of noise that 24 or Helga did. Some think that's a good thing, some a very bad thing. Controversy continues.

Consolidation

Reflection


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