User:REALnothings

There's a world of knowledge to absorb!

I'm a writer and teacher living in the San Francisco bay area.

I was thrilled when I realized recently that the very helpful Wikipedia articles, that I use more and more to link to from my web pages "What Remains Is the Essence", are collaboratively authored by "all of us"!

I started adding facts and links I believed relevant, but all I added almost immediately got bounced! I wrote a poem about the experience (posted at the Poemhunter website. I think I'll paste it in below. I look forward to being a part of this community!

Wikipedia: Totem and Taboo

by Max Reif The laws of kinship and membership that applied to the tribes of the stone age have now made the leap to the Internet— remaining as binding as ever!

Have you heard of Wikipedia, that fantastic online resource of hundreds of thousands of articles, each peppered with photos and hotlinks, one on any subject you think of?

I've been using it more and more, and this morning I noticed a note on a page: Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Suddenly, there before me the fields of accumulated human knowledge, all orderly, green, and lovely, lay awaiting my contribution.

Joyfully, I obliged them, plowing their fertile furrows, transplanting my delicate seedlings, caressing tall, waving stalks.

I felt proud to have something to add there, gleaned from 6 decades of living, reading, observation and study.

An example: I found an article about the Cathedral in St. Louis, my home town, that never mentioned the building contains more mosaic art than any other structure on earth!

I added a sentence of text and put in a link to the photos I'd taken of those mosaic ceilings, as fine as any in Europe,

and felt part of the great human lineage that has brought us here from the stone age on the shoulders of shoulders of giants, those giants on shoulder too, as far back as anyone knows.

I was startled out of this revery by a notice that appeared on the screen at the top of a Wikipedia page: You have new messages!

Bewildered, I clicked on that tab. A site sentinel named 'davidbd' had removed every word I'd just added,

and left this note of his own: 'If you advertise your website here, we'll block you from editing pages at all! '

Ah, the guardian at the Gate! I hadn't been advertising, unless you call relevant content an ad,

but I realized I'd transgressed an ancient law. All things on earth have strings attached. If anything looks too good to be true,

it is! Every human endeavor emanates from some community, whose invisible, ethereal wires tether things in their places.

These laws are the custodians of all we hold dear. There are protocols for entry, and were that not the case, we would likely not have survived evolution at all.

And so, for the thousandth time in my life I sigh at my naivete' and humbled, prepare to go 'round and knock on the front door for entry—

proceeding with the learning that really matters, the physics of human relations.

ps: If any of this is obscure to you, check the article on Anthropology— at [http://www.wikipedia.org. www.wikipedia.org]

copyright 2005 by Max Reif