Talk:Robert A. Swanson

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Carlobosques.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 08:13, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

B.W. and A.W. and Robert Swanson, d. 1999

Robert Swanson's biography here is a good test case. If you died before Wikipedia, are you in some sense pre historic? There's no doubt that Swanson, with Herbert Boyer, founded the microbiology industry. See Boyer's article. There's very little doubt that Swanson, when he funded Boyer, here in what became Silicon Valley, was a role model for the venture capitalists who created Silicon Valley itself; perhaps the great role model. In 1976, they modeled a new relationship between money and "pure" science which was very controversial at the time. The Nobel snubbed Boyer to punish him, some speculate. Yet Swanson's wikipedia article is a third the size of Jack Dorsey's, who founded Twitter. Indeed, it's smaller than that of any minor officer of Twitter. While their articles grow into epics, his will probably fossilize in place. Two hundred years from now, students trying to reconstruct Silicon Valley, will greatly overestimate the importance of everyone in the Wikipedia age. Unless he has left his papers to a research facility, they will find almost nothing about Swanson, and reams about Twitter. To have lived before the Wikipedia fact-gathering device may come to be, in some sense, pre-historic. Will researchers begin to notice whether historical figures lived B.W. or A.W.? Before Wikipedia and After Wikipedia? Profhum (talk) 09:37, 19 February 2011 (UTC)