Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-12-01/Reflections

Catherine Munro's excellent poem put me in mind of these words by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) written in 1912 which I've always felt applied well to Wikipedia.

Gitanjali 35 (Song Offerings) 1 Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; 2 Where knowledge is free; 3 Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; 4 Where words come out from the depth of truth; 5 Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; 6 Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; 7 Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action -- 8 Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. Lumos3 (talk) 16:27, 1 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Honestly I am surprised that more wasn't said about World War I in this edition. You only commemorate a centennial anniversary once; I should like to have seen more...thought, or content or something put into this one. Admitedly, given how little I heard about it on November 11 I guess I should be happy that it got a mention at all, but still... TomStar81 (Talk) 14:01, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
 * That's just one of the problems of recentism. Because the community is gradually evolving to a point where most members don't know of important historical periods such as WWII, the 60s, or even pre-Internet. (By "know of", I'm including having parents, relatives, or older people who lived thru these periods.) It's hard to be mindful of a period such as the Great Depression when one has no personal connection to it. (Or have enough of a feel for it for one's internal bullshit detector to work.) Oversight of the end of WWI is simply the latest, & not the last, example of our lack of a sense for history. -- llywrch (talk) 21:08, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Sad but true. In hindsight, now that I am actually thinking more about it, I'd have thought the signpost may have reached out to milhist or to the various national and/or political projects to get some input on the end of World War I. I'd have been interested to have seen what Wikipedia as a whole did during the WWI centenary years. At Wikipedia_talk:Today's_featured_article it was noted that there were FA-Class articles run on the front page during the WWI years. It would have been nice to build off that too and see if there were other DYKs, FPs, and so forth and when they ran. They do have remembrance and Veteran's day commemorations up here, but from a centennial anniversary the first such observations of the end of WWI weren't until 1919, while it appears from a cursory glance that the first tomb of the unknown soldier wasn't formally consecrated until 1920. Like I said, I'm just happy someone out there remembered because a bunch of people didn't - even the History Channel, which I was certain would do something for the anniversary - had no special programing airing on 11/11/2018 for the centenial end World War I. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TomStar81 (talk • contribs) 16:27, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps the centenary of the end of the First World War was not a big thing in the US (perhaps it rained) but it was in Europe, as World War I centenary and Category:Centenary of World War I and related articles show. Lest we forget. 213.205.240.196 (talk) 19:11, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
 * That could be too - the US was late to the party. Still lost a bunch of men in the fighting though, but not an unreasonable hypothesis for the absence of commemorating material. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:52, 4 December 2018 (UTC)