Slashdot Mirror
FUD-Based Encyclopedias
blacklily8 writes "Someone has finally gotten around to offering an intelligent point-by-point rejoinder to an ex-Brittanica editor's lambasting of Wikipedia--which was covered in this earlier Slashdot post. Aaron Krowne, a mathematician and head of Emory University's library research department, argues here that established encyclopedias are using FUD to discredit what is actually a more reliable way to build an encyclopedia: 'McHenry's definition of quality seems to consist solely of presentational matters such as spelling, grammar, and text flow. These are of course important considerations, but I propose that there are other important facets of quality - for example, coverage.'"
presenting it this way is honest. after all, these two ideas are simply that... ideas.
Um, no. You're throwing details away to try and reach some kind of equivilancy between religion and science when none such exists. Science is all about observing and quantifying, and religion is about speaking out of your ass to explain things you don't understand. Yes, sometimes science gets it wrong, and a hundered years from now scientists will be laughing at how we came to such silly conclusions to some of our observations, but science also gets it right much of the time. Whereas nothing dealing with religion can be provably right, because it's all based around unobservable, unquantifiable forces.
Religion is valuable due to its historical and cultural aspects, but it has no place in any rational effort to explain how the universe works.