Talk:Wiki99/world history
About this list[edit]
I have no idea what I am doing. Blue Rasberry (talk) 01:07, 13 January 2020 (UTC)
About this first draft[edit]
My intention was to identify very popular topics each of which would be of interest to multiple contemporary cultures, then try to get some diversity in representation so that each culture appeared a limited number of times to leave room for others to increase the scope of coverage. I feel a thread in history where the culture which spreads itself is the one with the most influence, so cultures which assert themselves more today are more present in this list. I wish I had an easy way to run numbers get a heat map over time to see how much of the world I cover through history, and also to detect the coverage of the Wikipedia articles which I did not select. I built this list out of my head and hardly browsed Wikipedia looking for options, so if I missed something, that is a reflection of either my ignorance or my lack of reflection in haste.
In Wikipedia we talk often of representation of women. If anyone asked me who the most important person in history was, then I could make arguments for 20 men. When I think of important women, I think of Elizabeth I of England (Q7207), Victoria (Q9439), Catherine II of Russia (Q36450), and Wu Zetian (Q9738) as independent regents of empires. Probably history's most influential woman is Virgin Mary (Q345). I hardly read articles in putting this list together, but I did look at women's history (Q1279400), and my impression of it is that until modern times women were second to men in agency. I felt that that women's history article belabors that point repeatedly for every century and culture, so instead I went with the more modern history of feminism (Q2297554) which I feel is a better historical narrative of what has been happening and why.
My best guess at the most important woman in history is Margaret Sanger (Q285514) because the narrative as I understand it is that she uniquely pushed forth birth control, and had she not, access to birth control would have been delayed years in the United States. Her early timing was especially important because she established family planning culture only a generation before the advent of the birth control pill, and in that time, her views became American foreign policy and led to the global propagation of reproductive technology, ideology, and practice. Sanger also took the route of establishing an organization, Planned Parenthood (Q2553262), which greatly advanced social discussion about human reproduction during that strange time of global media reach before the digital age. The significance of this was that various cultures could get family planning information from the United States, but before the Internet and therefore still within the time period before globalization when cultures were still localizing foreign ideas. I do not see this narrative in history of birth control (Q5899541). I intend to ask friends and colleagues who the most important woman in history was, and see what they say. I am a fan of Annie Besant (Q464318) as well, who advocated for birth control earlier in the British Empire, but she also had less impact with that part of her activism. I have three biographies in this list right now - Alexander the Great (Q8409), Charles Darwin (Q1035), and Margaret Sanger (Q285514). These three are important, and their accomplishments are so close to their own lives that I thought it would be better a better presentation of historical context to present their biographies than any article of the history around them.
For religions I tried to find history of religion articles. For certain topics of general interest I took the article on the history of that cultural aspect. A made some big obvious omissions on history of Western culture, and for example, I excluded history of the United States (Q131110). Even though the United States is, for example, overwhelmingly influential on global culture and the direction of history right now, it and many other cultures in power now will have great representation in those topical and religion articles.
For certain regions I chose history of that region of culture. I was not too thoughtful about this.
I am most lost on the meta-articles about history itself. Blue Rasberry (talk) 02:09, 13 January 2020 (UTC)
Presentation to WikiProject History on English Wikipedia[edit]
Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:01, 19 January 2020 (UTC)
Stopping point?[edit]
The closer a topic gets to the present the less it seems like history.
There could be a cut-off point for what we treat as history and what we treat as modern society.
Some possible cut off points which I think could be useful are stopping before World War I or with the establishment of the United Nations after World War II. World War I seems like a reasonable point to stop before because of the world changing advancement in warfare at that point. If we go through WWI, then stopping with the hopeful international story of the UN after seems like a good stopping point before the advent of global electronic communication.
I chose to stop at WWII. If we continued, then here are the topics which I think are important for history.