On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 12:25 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
I provided both versions of the XML if you want to
muck around with
that. I don't think there's much historical value in the control
characters.
Probably not. I was reminded again today that XML 1.1 (for a reason
I'm still not quite sure of) never really gained all that widespread
of support.
Speaking of historical value, I found the argument
between Lars
Aronsson and Larry Sanger, which caused Lars to quit and found
susning.nu. It happened on May 21.
Lars had just spent several days writing dictionary-like articles, and
he wrote [[Short words]] to organise the effort. At 12:48, Larry
complained about this on [[LA2]], and at 12:53, he created [[Wikipedia
is not a dictionary]], which was clearly an attack on what Lars was
doing. At 12:54, Lars announced that he was leaving, as a comment on
[[Wikipedia is not a dictionary]]. There were several responses.
On July 24, Larry erased all the comments from [[Wikipedia is not a
dictionary]], and on July 28, he rewrote the original text, toning
down the language. Before I found this backup, the earliest version we
had of this policy page was from August 17.
Interesting. I came to accept the "Wikipedia is not a dictionary"
guideline/policy pretty soon after reading that page - and much to my
dismay I find it to be fairly widely ignored when it comes to
etymology, usage, and profanity. I'm interested in seeing what the
original and/or newly rewritten language had to say about it.