I am relatively new to the computer age. It wasn't until I entered graduate school at the age of 50 years that i bought a home PC. Our Poor, deprived kids had to make do on the schools computer systems. Not a bad idea to my way of thinking, that way the sites were better monitored.
In fact, I wrote all the papers for my first semester on an old, borrowed word processor from my Dad and got a funny look from the professor when I asked "What is spell check?" Needless to say, that second semester I had a PC!
It was also durig graduate school that I found the Wikipedia. It was like finding candy stuck to the orange at the very bottom of the stocking on Christmas Day! Such a boon! All this information that is true, reviewed and citable! Not to mention information that is up to date, added to on a regular basis by ordinary writers and lovers of information just like ourselves!
So, this month, while researching for different hubs, I saw this banner at the top of all the Wikipedia articles asking me to "Please Read THis". Turned out it is a yearly request for a small donation to help continue the project co founded by J Wales and L Sanger in March of 2000. Now here we are a decade later and we all use ad lve the Wikipedia for sure and like PBS, it needs our help to keep on growing.
Now that all of that is over and I am through gushing there is also the small matter of notoriety and millions of dollars. Oh yes, Wikipedia and all its wonderful help for us little people is not without it's own private scandals. In fact, it has been cited repeatedly that J Wales has tried to rewrite history and feels he is the one and only founder of Wikipedia.
L Sanger, on the other hand feels that due to the age of "tranparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out" and indeed, in Wales own Wiki article it appears that many references to the first days of the start up of the project were indeed removed or at the least "forgotten".
Not that this really changes anything as far as the contributions of both Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. There would be a hole in the cyberspace of education without both their collective endeavors as well as the millions of entries by writers who helped collect information, write it, publish it all on the Wikipedia without asking for any credit of their own!
Therefore, without any other argument or attempt to say which is the founder or the co-funder or just the most cited, let's all say Hoorah for BOTH Wales and Sanger and a huge Thank You to their creation of the best encyclopedia of the world!
May we never suffer bouts of sneezes as we open an old tomb of a dusty encyclopedia ever again!
barbara bethard
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