User:Chamberlian/sandbox

Wikilese is dying, and I am glad to see it go. The problem, though, is that the whole Wikipedia Movement is going with it.

Do not misunderstand me; Wikipedia is just as well-know and well-used as ever, indeed, it has moved up to the sixth most visited website and has finally begun to be accepted by academics. The problem is that the heyday of Wikipedia seems to be over. This may be the result of its editors gaining social lives, or of jobs, or of simply burning out. So what have these changes changed? Not much on the outside, but an awful lot internally.

Wikipedia was still fairly new when I joined it in the beginning of 2006. I was here when we first reached one million articles. I was here in the golden age, back when one had to dig through reams of faux-HTML formatting to edit, back when most editors spent more time commenting on policies than writing, back when I loved nothing better than to take a paragraph that sounded too direct, too active, too unencyclopedic, and work through it, line by line, thoroughly researching such obscure topics. I learned how one should officially treat dates effected by the Julian to Gregorian calender upgrade, how to cite an online translation of Plutarch when only part of it had been published in print.