User:Manning Bartlett

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An old-timer who has been here since the very, very early days (I know Larry Sanger if that helps gives you a sense of time). In the days before tilde-signing, we used to just write our initials (that's how few of us there were). I am hence regularly found in the old stuff under MMGB.

I joined the 'pedia around the time it hit 10,000 articles, somewhere in mid-2001. Those were the days when you could get to know every single editor on the project. I was a member of the first group of admins ever appointed. Apart from creating and developing many, many articles, I was instrumental in many of the earliest decisions about Wikipedia policy and structure, such as the fleshing out of WP:NPOV (as developed by Jimbo), the creation of Meta (all of the policy discussions were held in the main 'pedia - we had no namespaces), and the development of the first management system for editing utilities. I also created the Wikiproject concept (and coined the term) and I created the original "Page Titles to be deleted" back in the days when we had no admins and only Tim Shell and Jimbo could actually delete pages from the database. I also created the original Wikipedia Anti-rules which LMS hated. (Since relocated to a user subpage of mine.)

So that's the good side of the story. The bad side is that I was also a member of the large group who walked away when the "bureaucracy" crisis hit in the initial post-Sanger days, back around mid-2002. (Don't even mention "Ed Poor" or "The Cunctator"). This was when the focus of the 'pedia shifted from "quality" to "bureaucracy". This balance has swung back and forth ever since, although I am very pleased to see that the balance has clearly swung in favour of "quality" again.

I never really left the 'pedia, but I spent several years quietly refusing to log in, and just edited quietly from a series of anonymous IPs. This has resulted in my having a very patchy "edit history", with what appears to be enormous gaps. However this doesn't worry me, as I've always opposed the "edit count" as a measure of merit. Quality, not quantity. I tended to log in only when I felt it was time to use my admin rights (hence my deletion record is larger than my edit record).

I live in Sydney Australia, for what it's worth, and I'm 39. My user name is my real name.

For my own amusement, here are some articles I originally created (back in the days when you could actually do that) and relevant history records.

Here are my contributions from the days before we moved to the new platform. About 70-80% of the records appear lost, as there are none before September 2001 and none after Dec 14, 2001, and enormous gaps in between (check the history log for Scientific Method below and you'll see what I mean).

My old, hand-managed contribution page from Nostalgia
Nostalgia Contribution Log

Sadly the history pages on Nostalgia are not as reliable as one might hope. I am not listed on Princess Diana yet I absolutely remember writing the original article. Conversely, this history log tells me that I was the originator of Scientific Method which is simply NOT true.