User talk:Ushwia

Welcome!
Wow. I'm in a bit of shock right now. I just listened to Jimmy Wales being interviewed on the show "On Being", and I wept. Literally. I have tears in my eyes. Because this SPACE you have created. is. perfect.

Let's define "space" as the capacity for persons to interact freely and easily. Which seems counter intuitive, I know, you want it to be a place, but it's not a place. In the physical world, proximity gives us the ability to interact easily and freely. In a digital world, access to the internet gives us the ability. There are other ways that we create spaces, but we'll stick with these two for a second.

Physical space is broken into these expanding concentric circles around the self. there is the home. There is the neighborhood. The community (broken into religious, social, and vocational? perhaps?) The Municipality, the State, the Country. Each physical space has it's own subset of rules governing just the members of that most tiny minority, the individual. Thus, in my family, there is no eating without saying grace. That's not a City rule. My City says, "no parking from 2pm-5pm" in the place where I need to park every 2:30. And on and on. The more people those rules encompass, the more power (ability to do work) it needs to have. Becuase 1) it lays the foundation for every other rule that flows under it and 2) it's end product is a measure of it's strength. The U.S. Constitution allowed us the ability to create a society, a structure, where the members of the community were able to create the US as we know it. Most people say, "Hell yeah, 'meruka" look at our GDP and call it a day, but the sum of who we have become is more than than. there is the death count, the tension, the gluttony, the charity, the happiness, the creativity, the ideas that bloom into the discoveries of new boundaries and new horizons. We are more than import export, is what I'm saying.

Wikipedia is a space. It is a country. And it may just be the most perfect country ever designed.

A country is defined as a nation with it's own government. Countries deal with each other on the country level. And then there are these strange cases, like the Vatican, interacts with the World on a country level. But, no other religion does. Google and Apple, might almost be on a country level, but they are still operating under the laws of whatever place they are in.

Wikipedia is, in that sense, it's own country. It's "location" wikiedia.org is wholly controlled by the foundation, and it's rules and operations could make it Vatican-like. Because while the USER is in a particular country, and is governed by those laws, the space is not. It is a free space governed by it's own set of laws and rules that transcend any country or place. It began, like the United States of America, as a grand experiment. The american experiment was "Can we make a government of the people, by the people, for the people (yes, I know that is Lincoln. The point is that the experiment was to see if this new principal, could fundamentally societies arranged themselves, the people vs. the government.) The experiment that Wikipedia became is, "can we give free access to all the people in the world all the information in the world." It wants to fundamentally change the way humans relate to information. removing the barriers that have always existed socially to information: did you have access to it or not. could you afford it or not. That's as revolutionary as the american experiment, becuase it necessarily requires every member of it's society to come from differing backgrounds. Which would tend to explode, (as seems to happen in both physical and digital spaces). But, the rules in this space have created some beautiful balance. Let's call it a Transparent Egalitarianism. This is a political philosophy that literally undermines the belief that digital spaces cannot be safe. It's crazy. It's so safe, it allows people on the opposing side in wars to trust each other enough to come together in physical space. What.

Listening to this, I wept. I wept with happiness, because I see how incredible this thing actually is. There is a whole country of wikipedians. And they let tourists in and take their information. Some tourists add some, some vandalize, but that is in every space. And every tourist is still welcome. (how's that for an immigration policy?) I hear people talk about it self correcting, and I never understood the depth of the organism that was Wikipedia. I recently saw an advertisement for a grant to the Wikiconference. And I genuinely wondered who would be eligible. I read the requirements, and there was an entire portion of discussing your contributions to Wikipedia, which made sense, but I imagined, "I wrote an update on Taylor swift." Not, "I've been working with interational aid workers to bring information out of Syria." or "Me and some guys from Tibet were having a debate about the meaning of Some Ancient Text, and need to settle this in seattle!!" Like. Damn. This is a community of people dedicated to uncovering all the facts and presenting it neutrally. And now you're having wiki babies.

This is the community that I'd always believed existed. And I didn't realize that it was so close.

Also, I don't know how to do this, but the beta rollover features shouldn't have the picture. One issue I saw was that on the homepage, North tower was a redirect hyperlink to WTC, and the image that came up is of the freedom tower, so it appears as if Notrth tower is the one that is currently standing.

I think only pictures of people, maybe?


 * I'm marking your question as answered because it doesn't really require administrator intervention. If your question is about technical problems, you should ask at WP:VPT, which is where the coders congregate. Welcome to Wikipedia! :-) Katietalk 12:12, 12 September 2016 (UTC)