On 5 March 2005, I (John Schmidt) was at Wikipedia and stumbled across the WingMakers article. I (John) soon explored the Wingmakers and Lyricus websites and found the original Wingmakers discussion forum (username = Memenen).
I was particularly struck by the idea that "Lyricus Teaching" called for a scientific investigation of the soul. The idea of a science of the soul is something that I have been interested in for a long time. I began posting to the discussion forum in an attempt to determine if anyone there took seriously the idea of a science of the soul. By March 8 I was exchanging emails with people like John Berges. There seemed to be several types of people in the WingMakers community including:
- New Age types who were exploring their personal spirituality
- Analytic types who were exploring the general meaning of the WingMakers/Lyricus materials
While a few members of the WingMakers community seemed interested in a science of the soul, it did not seem like the original WingMakers discussion forum was well suited for a serious discussion of the prospects for science of the soul.
I created a Yahoo discussion group specifically for Lyricus Teaching related to a scientific analysis of the soul. I also began looking for a wikifarm where it would be possible to work on the science of the soul in a wiki environment. By 14 March 2005, I had identified Wikia as the best wiki host. I was concerned that a wikia dealing only in science of the soul would be too narrow. In my view, science of the soul is a Protoscience, so I proposed the creation of a new Wikia that would deal with all protosciences.
Support for the new wiki was "huge", but by 5 April 2005, the Protoscience Wikia was online, with a subsection for Science of the soul and a Lyricus page as a sub-subsection. On 14 April 2005, Alexander started to contribute some material to the wiki on Lyricus topics such as Genetic Mind.
On 29 April 2005, I was informed that the original WingMakers discussion forum has been taken offline. I went to the new forum and discovered that there was concern about how to recover material from the old discussion forum and how to archive discussions and othe rderivative WingMakers materials so that they cannot be lost. I set up the Wingmakers Archives as a place that can play this role. (Contributors)
May 30, 2005. According to Wikistats (Wikistatsnew), the Protoscience wikia had about 100 visits per day during May and about 365 page requests per day. It is interesting that so few people bother to edit a page. According to Webalizer, I (John Schmidt) accounted for almost 20% of the page requests in May, compared to almost 50% in April.
June 5, 2005. As part of the continuing effort to let people know that the Protoscience Wikia exists, this wiki has been linked into some webrings.
June 9, 2005. The Protoscience Wikia Main Page is now number 8 in a Google search for protoscience.
June 11, 2005. The Protoscience Wikia Bus Stop is now underconstruction.
June 24, 2005. The Webalizer stats for June are contaminated by the event of June 22 and 23. I (John Schmidt) was down-loading a backup copy of the Protoscience Wikia (see: Weird Apache hits). Subtracting out that event, the site has been getting about 900 Webalizer-measured hits per day in June, up from about 500 in May. Another interesting feature from Webalizer is that various webcrawlers seem to be many of the major visitors!