Jump to content

User:Profhum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm a tenured full Professor in California, author of many novels and critical books, primarily involving avant garde aesthetics, religion, ethnicity and Asia. That's not my usual work on Wikipedia articles, though. I teach undergraduates, currently born 2000-2004, who became aware of current events no earlier than 2012, when they were in, at best, fifth grade. I know from tests and class discussions what has to be added to an explanation to make it intelligible to that age group. I add that kind of information to articles I've been reading, to make our articles intelligible to college students now, and to future generations. No college students of traditional age have any personal memory of 9/11, for instance. A second age effect: since Wikipedia says its editors have an average age of 32, and those under 28 are more active, our average editor only became aware of the world around 2000. There are longer articles about minor characters on a TV show like LOST than on major American cultural figures from even a decade earlier. The Cold War never happened, a meaningless false alarm. On Wikipedia, civilization seems to have begun in the 1990s. "Mine is the first and only world," Wittgenstein rightly said. Wikipedia will present future generations a weird, skewed version of the Dark Ages before Mariah Carey taught the world how to sing, Kobe & Shaq invented basketball, Chris Kattan made us all laugh, unless we give the editors some help. There are plenty of excellent written resources ("books") about the Dark Ages pre-Internet and I add from them to articles. I implore others who, like myself, are in the spin cycle of life, to take up this work for the sake of teachers and students still to come. Profhum (talk) 20:03, 2 November 2021 (UTC) Profhum (talk) 05:16, 4 July 2018 (UTC)