[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

Fri Sep 17 21:47:10 UTC 2010

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nathan" <nawrich at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2010 7:17 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

> As for progress since 2005 - unless I'm mistaken, all of your own work
> dates to after 2005. Would you not describe your own work as improving
> the encyclopedia from its 2005 state?

Not at all.  I began editing in 2003. William of Sherwood, which I wrote 
with Sara Uckelmann (a medieval specialist who no longer contributes 
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_of_Sherwood&oldid=33153045

I rewrote the article Existence around then 
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Existence&oldid=23936506 . You can 
see it now http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence with all those tags on 
that I didn't place there. The article is a mess, hacked around by a hundred 
different people. Zermelo set theory is another example

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zermelo_set_theory&diff=32606620&oldid=32606590

Note the edit by Randall Holmes -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Randall_Holmes

This was the period when a lot of serious and high-powered users were on the 
project and doing great stuff.  Wikipedia started becoming really popular 
around then and the period 2005-7 saw some big changes.  Vandalism started 
to rise a lot, and with it was the growth of the 'policeman' class of admin. 
This group generally didn't get on with the content creators and this period 
was mostly a war between the two groups.  The content creators lost because 
they had no political power.

A serious study would be needed to confirm my observations, of course.

Kind regards,

Peter