Plant a seed, and watch it grow. Someone takes a little sapling of yours—as tall and proud as you could make it, but not a full-grown tree—and builds it up, linking it with other parts of the project; someone else chips in and adds in more boughs and leaves; soon, it's become a substantial part of the great tree of knowledge and you can't find the dividing line between your work and theirs, and it's starting to bear fruit. You can see the step-by-step progress and dissect it at the finest level and trace each change's effects—but the sum is greater than the parts, and the fruit is sweeter than the farmer's sweat. Except, if you hadn't planted the seed, or hadn't moulded the branches, or hadn't shovelled on the mulch, the tree wouldn't have grown quite as tall or as bountiful as it did...
That's why I contribute to Wikipedia. I want to see my work transformed in ways I can't even imagine into amazing new forms. I want people halfway around the world—people I'll never meet, or even know exist—to build on what I do today and make the world a little bit better, somehow. Wikipedia is an orchard and we're planting the seeds—but it's better than an orchard, because everyone who wants the fruit can have some, and they can do whatever they want with it.
Notes on Wikipedia
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- Wikipedia is not done: an essay that attempts to quantify how large Wikipedia could grow.
- Article meta-assessment: randomly sampling articles to get an idea of the quality of article assessments.
Ordinary members of the Vienna Secession
editWladimir Tetmeyer-Przeiwa (probably Włodzimierz Tetmajer)
<ref>{{ cite magazine | magazine = [[Ver Sacrum (magazine)|Ver Sacrum]] | title = Ordentliche Mitglieder | trans_title = Ordinary Members | year = 1898 | volume = 1 | page = 28 | url = http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/vs1898/0032 }}</ref>