User:Dbachmann
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| the Moon |
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curriculum wikis
- my Username is Dbachmann. My signature is dab;
My wikistatistics in a nutshell: I have joined Wikipedia on 21 July 2004 [7], and was made an admin on 11 November 2004. My 5,000th edit to article space was on 10 March [8], my 10,000th edit to any namespace on 7 April [9] 2005. My watchlist reached 1,000 entries on 5 August 2005. My 10,000th edit to article namespace was on 6 September [10], my 20,000th edit to any namespace was on 24 November 2005 [11]. I passed the 35k mark some time in June and the 40k one on 4 October 2006.
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kind awards: 
[12] [13] 
[14] 
[15] [16] 
[17] [18] [19] 
[20] [21] 
[22][23]
on Wikipedia
Wikipedia works: the childish graffitti is no problem (thanks to the heroic members of the RCP), and the bulk of the well-meaning but uninformed or sub-standard additions get ironed out over time: from the rubble, encyclopedicity emerges. Of course, a large percentage of our 400M or so words are still rubble (or cruft), and this should be kept in mind in comparisons of size (let alone numbers of "articles").[1] The only cases where this synergetic effect breaks down is when the editors adding sub-standard material are extremely motivated, mostly due to religious or nationalist reasons (often both combined), or more rarely because of a strange obsession with a specific field (kooks). For these cases, Wikipedia has developed an impressive system of checks and balances, which do work out in the end, but at the cost of efficiency. While most articles achieve a high standard as it were by themselves, topics suffering from such dedicated disruption take a lot more investment than would be required of a closed board of editors. For this reason, the more content Wikipedia has to defend, it will become more and more important that disruption is unceremoniously dealt with (i.e. that offenders are blocked quickly), for the protection of the sane and fruitful editing process.
on the 21st century
Academic hacks announcing the "end of history" are just examples of the universal tendency to over-estimate the long-term significance of the events in one's own lifetime. What is true is that of the past five centuries, each has been more dramatic than any preceding century in human history (where by "dramatic", we mean "bloody") and the 21st century shows good promise of continuing that trend. We do however, for the first time since the Paleolithic, expect that world population will curb, at around 10 billion people, in the 2050s. This "curb" that looks like a nice and comforting thing when drawn on a piece of paper, represents of course the fate of millions, for whom to "curb" will mean starvation, epidemics, and bitter war. This isn't some futurologist's speculations, the protagonists of this "drama" are being born as we speak, and most of us will likely be around to watch it live on the internet. By this I mean that the "West" (and China, by other means) have their population growth slowing down already. They will be struggling to accomodate their old in the 2040s and 2050s, but by the 2060s, they will have a normal population pyramid again, with population density decreasing at an agreeable rate. They will not be a position to intervene in the conflicts of those regions that are less lucky like some benevolent advanced alien race, as this decade is teaching a USA showing the same signs of decadence that are familiar from late Imperial Rome, and others of history's superpowers. "The West" will be more than happy to shut themselves in splendid isolation, or be glad if they can just keep out of the worst bits. The regions that will bleed for this "curb" or "Great 21st Century Turnaround" are those that show a Youth Bulge now, that is, Africa, Southwest, South and Southeast Asia.[2] These regions are already full of angry young men, and they will be even more so in 25 years' time. Angry young men are quick to embrace religion, nationalism and ideology, but these are essentially interchangable rationalizations for their anthropological impetus to fight until the population pyramid is back in shape. The crisis of the mid-century is not a speculation, it is a straightforward projection, and the wiser governments have long begun anticipating it. What we do not know is how it will turn out: we have a clear idea of what the world will look like in 2040, but we have no idea whatsoever of what it will look like in 2080. The worst-case scenario is, as always, a total cataclysm, with the biosphere bombed back to the Paleozoic. But our hope should be that the "great turnaround" succeeds, and that after much suffering, the 21st century ends in emerging stability, with a true new world order and a steadily decreasing population of some 9 billion. If this happens, the "modern" 16th to 21st centuries will in retrospect appear as a catastrophic final stretch, culminating millennia of population growth, before for the first time a truly stable human society (and economy) that has overcome its dependence on growth and expansion could emerge.
notes
- ^ About one third of articles are longer than 2k; on average, an article has some 4k or 300 words. [1] I estimate that with a reasonable mergist approach, the number of articles on the English Wikipedia would be reduced by about a third; see also WP:ʃ
- ^ see list of countries by population growth rate; sustained growth rates around 1.4%, that is, a doubling time within two generations, should be considered critical.
![[9]](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_talk:Davos_Switzerland_G8_Summit.jpg&diff=prev&oldid=11989742){kind=link}