Visions
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This page describes only your unrealistic visions for the wikipedia. Visions are extreme hallucinatory daydreaming, too-good-to-be-true ideals with high impact but no measurable probability - because they can't happen. They're fantasy. No one believes in them. Not even you. They're fiction.
The ideal vision is something you have never admitted to anybody at all, for fear they would laugh at you or drastically degrade you to other people for "not being realistic" or "ignoring reality" or some such cynical claim.
If you have ever heard a truly compelling vision of what the world could be "if only..." from anyone else in your life, this is the place to finally write it down. Anonymity is best since you may hold back if others know your name. A good vision would contain fantasy elements from all utopias you ever believed in, and several that you laughed at, and riduculed other people for.
If you are describing something that you consider a reasonable goal, that you believe can ever actually happen to any substantial degree, or has a measurable probability, it is a best cases and not a "vision". Be very careful with this distinction - best cases are something we allocate real w:human capital and (indirectly) w:natural resources to get done... a single good vision, however, would break us, were we even to really attempt it.
Enter examples of visions that far exceed anything ever considered as The Future of Wikipedia, include all of the compatible best cases, and render wiki immune to all threats in the bargain.
The few language-using w:Great Apes and the last w:Stone Age Amazonians become the honorary editorial board, new editors have to prove their subject is relevant to their satisfaction, and wiki moves its legal headquarters into the w:Amazon rainforest for tax reasons. A working wiki editorial board from w:civil society grows into a functioning w:world government using wild rainforest acres as its banking standard - the more of these you preserve, the richer you are. Aliens finally reveal that this level of wisdom was what they were waiting to see before they revealed themselves. All medical technology and body modification methods are revealed to humans who can take their place among civilized species of the universe. Offhand, an alien ambassador admits that all humans would have been tortured to death in medical experiments if not for wiki deciding to "respect the next species up the ladder the way that you wanted to be respected by us superior types". Everyone gets a good laugh out of the last w:particle accelerator being turned into a new age gambling casino... and golfers voluntarily give up the game, gollums give up AI and nanotech, in favor of dancing, singing, gardening, extremely creative sex, vegan cooking. Great articles on all these things with step-by-step instructions appear in wiki, so fast that no one could keep up, and they are edited and improved by cliques oriented around value systems who each keep their own fork of wiki. Vocabulary is miraculously kept low enough that a very clever ape or very dumb human or someone who learned English from w:Zero Wing can understand the instructions.
- Also, all of these people, primates and extraterrestrials realize that Wikipedia is not Wiki. :)
w:Wikipedians never sling personal insults at each other, no matter how much they disagree. NOTE: this vision is much harder to achieve than the other two, since it conflicts with various personal agendas.
At some point, perhaps at Version 2.0, the Wikimedia Foundation engraves the entire contents of Wikipedia and Wiktionary in all languages onto a number of stone tablets. This is done in honor of Wikipedia's Ptolemaic heritage and to preserve the entire accumulated encyclopedic knowledge of humanity. The initial goal is to send the tablet sets (lithipedias) for each individual language to their language's native region; with the help of a generous donor, however, the Foundation is able to provide each country with lithipedias in their primary languages.
A series of proposals are developed and submitted to the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Through coordination on Meta and the agencies' gracious support, a set of lithipedias suitable for especially harsh conditions is produced, each to be sent on one of several interstellar probes. Luminaries wax about achieving the noble goals of preserving history for humankind and educating races across the galaxy (as yet still undetected). Wikipedians look to the future with hope.
This hope is to be short-lived, however. International tensions are high; a country formerly known as the United States of America (now officially the Democratic States of America) and referred to by most other countries as the "rogue states of America", "Rogue States", or simply "The States" has become increasingly arrogant and authoritarian in all affairs. Confident in its supremacy and resentful of other countries' policies, it claims governance of the United Nations and declares war upon the European Union when they oppose.
The survivors of this war, the largest in history, are few. Area denial measures far outlast the combatants; a critical level of damage is reached and then exceeded. In two months civilization collapses across the world. As hundreds of millions starve, the last desperate battles are fought until exhaustion.
In the decades that follow, the lithipedias prove their worth and are looked on as an endless, tragic fount of knowledge. Lifespans are short, however, and soon the previous civilizations gain legendary, then mythical status. It is as though humanity had risen against the gods and been destroyed for so doing; the lithipedias are believed to have been created by the gods afterward so that a new and wiser civilization might emerge.
It is in this setting, then, that one of the probes returns to Earth. The excited witnesses to its descent from the heavens eventually discover how to open it, finding a single, familiar stone tablet inside. They bring it to their LithiReader at once, and wait for the new message from the gods to be revealed.
Frustrating weeks pass as the Reader searches the tablet for the wisdom contained within. Eventually cursing his eyesight, he travels to the village of another Reader, who is also unsuccessful. She remembers a term used in certain rare texts, though, a term whose literal meaning was clear but which no Reader had been able to explain in any language of the lithipedia.
In time, similar tablets were found. Readers came to loathe the blank pages for the time they wasted, but still more they hated the tablets filled with indecipherable scripts. Thus, when the Outsiders finally arrived, humanity knew them as Vandals or Trolls and they were met with enmity rather than friendship.
The History of Wikipedia
[edit]Before Wikipedia was created, many people communicated by something known as the Internet, which can be thought of as a primitive form of Wikipedia. However, the Internet had many severe limitations, such as the inability of anyone, other than the original author, to correct outdated information on the Internet. Also, it was often hard to find useful information.
At the time of Wikipedia’s creation, it was actually only a small part of the whole Internet. It was originally intended to be an encyclopædia, where anyone could edit any information anytime. Although it is now hard for us to imagine that there could be a piece of information which people can't edit, at that time, it was actually a relatively new idea. Even so, editing was very limited in scope, time-intensive and required direct connection to the Internet. This information was divided into articles; each article had a different name, separating it from other discreet and seemingly unrelated articles. Links between articles were also added manually, and the content of these articles were further limited in scope since they could only contain text and pictures. To add to the general confusion, it was even possible for an individual contributor to accidentally add inconsistent or redundant information.
Despite these limitations, Wikipedia was by far the most effective system available, and therefore quickly became popular Internet destination for academics and researchers, as well as the general public. However, due to its free nature, Wikipedia met opposition in these early years from many large companies, which relied on patents and copyrights for profit.
One such (then-megalithic) computer company, called Microsoft, openly criticized Wikipedia and announced that they would not support Wikipedia. Soon after, they released a browser called Wikipedia Explorer. Unfortunately, this release was already too late to prevent them from going out of business, since by then most people had already switched to Wikipedia-friendly operating systems such as Linux, and using popular browsers, such as Wikera.
Later, several other for-profit companies compiled a list of copyright violations and obtained a court order in an attempt to shut down Wikipedia. However, on the day of the trial in country known as the United States (US), wikipedians actually did shut down all US-based Wikipedia servers, and blocked all traffic between the US and other “foreign” Wikipedia servers. Ironically, with all of the US-based Wikipedia shut down, the court had no choice but to drop the case since they had no way to access the case files. Later that day, the US-based Wikipedia was then restored. To avoid similar embarrassment, all pending European court cases against Wikipedia were also dropped.
Equally ironic, a terrorist attack, considered to be the single largest simultaneous one in history, occurred on Wikipedia day in the same year Wikipedia was celebrating having replaced 90% of the Internet. Although no one was hurt directly by this action, all 375 major Wikipedia servers worldwide were simultaneously destroyed by time-delayed explosives. This simultaneous destruction of all major Wikipedia servers caused pings of up to 20 seconds, and most video and virtual reality interfaces failed due to lack of bandwidth. This left only about 700 major wikivision channels still broadcasting worldwide.
In the wake of this tragic event, it has been estimated that tens of thousands of deaths resulted through cascading events; for instance, the crashing of public transport crashed, patients dying after their doctors were disconnected curing operations, as some hospitals still didn't even have their own wiki nodes. The biggest disruptions were in the third-world countries, large parts of which still had to connect to Wikipedia via the Internet. It took several days before all Wikipedia servers had been replaced. Thankfully, all vital facilities, without exception, had minor Wikipedia servers, or at least several wiki nodes, installed. As a safety precaution against the reoccurrence of similar events in the future, several million medium-capacity Wikipedia servers were built worldwide.
Many breakthroughs in Wikipedia protocol research have since been developed, allowing easier communication with Wikipedia and increasing the rate of adoption and learning of Wikipedia. Dolphins could communicate with Wikipedia hundreds of times faster than before. More importantly, Wikipedia was also adapted to the rather confusing human brain waves in addition to the much more clearly focused dolphin brain waves, which then allowed humans to communicate directly with Wikipedia.
With these stellar breakthroughs in Wikipedia protocol research, researchers set Wikipedia to analyze space for possible signals from extraterrestrial life. Surprisingly, they found signals coming from within our solar system, which turned out to be from an alien satellite. Since humanity created Wikipedia, it then had to consider humanity as an intelligent life form, qualifying humans for the basic rights of all civilizations in the universe. It was at this juncture that the human-created part of Wikipedia combined with the universal Wikipedia and, as such, became an intelligent creature imbued with all knowledge in the known universe. Soon after this, humans and dolphins were then acknowledged as valued members of the cosmic community and granted all the rights we are accustomed to today, such as the right to visit all the many civilizations and places in the universe and the right to eat unlimited amounts of chocolate ice-cream on Thursdays.