User:Brianhill
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A couple of quotes that seem appropriate for the Wikipedia experience, one descriptive and pessimistic, and one prescriptive and optimistic:
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." --Bertrand Russell
"Think like an organism, behave like a cell." --Preston Jordan
[edit] Philosophy and experience that guides my membership in the Wikipedia community
The Wikipedia has gotten amazing over the years despite all the real and hypothetical problems with a wide-open collaborative environment. I find this to be an inspiring testament to the goodness and intelligence of people in general. Even on controversial and rapidly developing subjects where it is intrinsically difficult to separate substance from rhetoric, and where one might imagine that complex protocols would be required to mediate between many contributors, the combined efforts of intelligent and self-critical people are resulting in an information source that is becoming higher quality and more comprehensive than any commercial or hierarchical system.
My personal areas of expertise are physics and software. These come from a PhD and postdoctoral work in theoretical particle physics followed by many years of working in software, including working on Mac OS X internals at NeXT and Apple and later on various web systems. I also have strong interests in some other areas, particularly environmental issues, which is the area I work in now.
Articles on environmental issues, and particularly on environmental health and justice issues, are often controversial. In such circumstances I believe it is important to quote and reference a wide range of sources. Then diligent readers can go to those sources and draw their own conclusions from the science and reasoning, and equally or more importantly, the values and personal experiences that they bring to any particular subject. While it requires additional effort on the reader's part to wade through a range of sources, any conclusions drawn from this kind of process are more compelling than even a very good exposition of a consensus position.
It is a genuine honor to make even tiny contributions to such an ambitious and significant endeavor.
--Brian Hill 16:12, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
