User:Jimmaciejewski

I'm Jim Maciejewski and this is my user page.

Professional Background

My professional background and current job is as a technical writer, developing and writing online Help systems and end-user documentation for software products.

Wikipedia Background

I've been contributing to Wikipedia since 2004. I'm mostly interested in topics related to ancient timekeeping, including water clocks and candle clocks.

Water Clock Background

I have been researching and writing about water clocks since July 2004. I'm not a professional, but I've been doing extensive research on the subject and have assembled a large collection of materials; and the list continues to grow.

If you would like, feel free to ask me questions or send me comments. I'll do my best to reply in a reasonable amount of time. I can be reached at waterclockguy@gmail.com.

My Soap Box

The original Wiki entry for water clocks was taken from the NIST website[[1]], which was originally drafted in 1975 for a visitor's booklet [[2]]. This write up is a decent high-level overview for the person who has no knowledge of what a water clock is, offering a nice springboard to learn more about them. A downside to this original draft (which has been modified little since then), however, is that it doesn't capture the significance and impact that the water clock has made to the history of timekeeping. It also leaves out so many important contributions that have been made by several cultures.

As great of a tool that the Internet is, it also has it's disadvantages and limitations. The facts that this text came from NIST (a very reliable source) and that the text is free to use have resulted in this text being present all over the Internet. If you did a Google search on varrious sentences of it, you'll find anywhere from 200 - 400 hits. This is about how many times this article has been copied, just on the Internet! Someone doing water clock research on the Internet would find it very difficult to find any other content. Has the Internet caused a stagnation of new information on some subjects? Or is it simply that not too many people care about water clocks? Probably the later.