I taught science and humanities for years at the high school and tertiary level in three countries and one of the biggest impressions I have of those experiences is the lack of historical context. ... What is unfortunate is that it is very common to find many people teaching high school sciences that either do not know or have no idea of how things developed, so they often repeat the standard stories about science and our technological progress, all the while neglecting or downplaying the real story behind science that someone like Richard Feynman would have inculcated into his students wherever he went. The development of the current theories of light and matter, are a good example. Few people have a clue as to how some guy in the 19th century could have figured out the speed of light and how those calculations were to later aid the current theory of quantum electrodynamics. These are important parts of the puzzle that students should know. I would like to suggest that we make those connexions wherever possible to inform our readers of what has transpired in the last few hundred years to provide us with us with what we know today and why we know.
While it is true I have had dinner with Grace Hopper, unfortunately, I never dated her. Nevertheless, I'm sure there are others here that either interacted with the creators of ideas, or even were involved in the development. Personally, I can recount a good deal of the development of the Internet and packet switching, the OSI model and where it went wrong, etc.
My caution would be that main articles need to use discretion in how much historical context to contain, since the general reader may or may not be interested in that. We cannot assume that readers will read through long articles, but we have can have much more confidence that the interested reader will take a link to a historical subarticle. Perhaps I'm sensitive to this in some of the fringe areas, but it's a mighty battle in homeopathy, where there is an attempt to link to 19th and early 20th century incorrect ideas of immunology to add weight to the arguments for homeopathy. An article on the solar system certainly should reference the earth-centric models, but the main article needs to focus on the heliocentric model, perhaps its refinement, but that's a different matter than the flatly wrong model.
