purposefully impossible mission statement

by phil on Sunday Jan 18, 2009 11:25 PM
love of rhetoric

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."

That's a quote by Jimmy Wales that they put on wikipedia's donation page. I really like it. It's obviously impossible, and wikipedia hardly comes close, but I really like feel of the gesture.

I sort of took a page from that quote when explaining my blog to a friend of mine. I said, "Initially, I wanted my blog to be an archive of every single one of my ideas."

That concept actually predates when I started my blog in 2003. I created a folder in 2001 called Philosophistry, where I intended to create one separate text file for each of my ideas. I started out, and maybe got to around ten text files. It wasn't until I had a public forum to post my ideas, that I really went to town.