greg said:

In short, I think anyone who wants to may edit the main Wikipedia page (it's not locked or otherwise protected).

the page is not locked, or otherwise protected. but the idea that "anyone who wants to" can edit a wikipedia page has been a myth since... oh, i dunno, about 2005 or so. you can _change_ a page, at least temporarily, but if one of the wikipedia insiders doesn't care for what you've written, they'll revert it. and there's not too much you can do about it. unless there are some wikipedia insiders here?... otherwise, let's look and see what they _have_, because that's likely to be what they will keep... first, they were very prompt entering his death. the timezones are a bit confusing, but it looks like they had it entered before greg's post here. (that's not surprising; there's competition over who will be the first person to enter any news.) and, as you'd expect, the attention meant that a flurry of edits have been made in the interim, most of them are rather inconsequential, but at 23:04 on the 8th, kaldari did an edit noting michael as "best known as the inventor of the e-book and the founder of project gutenberg", which i believe that michael would consider as the most important phrase describing himself. (and face it, "the most important phrase" is all that history and the great masses recall.) however, at 12:10 on the 9th, theo10011 did an edit (which s/he labeled a "minor rewrite") that changed "the inventor of the e-book" to "an inventor of e-book". this strikes me as a cop-out (and in addition the grammar's bad.) the washed-down version might be a bone that's being thrown just to avoid contention, because a lot of wiki editors shy away from statements that might be "controversial"... certainly there were people who wanted to bestow that "inventor" title to someone else; a common suggestion was vannevar bush, but i got the firm impression that some of michael's detractors would have been happy to have _anyone_ be awarded that little title, as long as it wasn't michael. petty bastards. now _perhaps_ kaldari will come back and revert the change that theo10011 made, so michael will again be called "the" inventor... or maybe it will just stick as "an inventor"... in the long run, it might not matter much. it's certainly true that michael is laughing about such trivia now that he has passed. he never got enough credit when he was alive and kicking, so why would he expect to get any more credit now that he's dead? but if the page _does_ get changed, it must be a change from one of the insider editors, who are all quite familiar with outsiders who want to barge in and "spruce up a page" as a way to deal with their grief from a death. -bowerbird