In the media
The past is not even past
December can be a slow month for news, as many journalists repeat the old saw that buying Christmas presents is good for the economy or otherwise promote their advertisers' businesses. We feared that we'd need to fill this space with some boring old history stories. We got history, all right – but it isn't boring. As William Faulkner wrote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This month's stories discuss the first edit on Wikipedia, strife over a massive deletion discussion, and even a critic who 17 years ago described Wikipedians as "Khmer Rouge in diapers."