Secret Mailing List Rocks Wikipedia

privatemusings writes "Wikipedians are up in arms at the revelations that respected administrators have been discussing blocking and banning editors on a secret mailing list. The tensions have spilled over throughout the 'encyclopedia anyone can edit' and news agencies are sniffing around. The Register has this fantastic writeup — read it here first." The article says that some Wikipedians believe Jimbo Wales has lost face by supporting the in-crowd of administrators and rebuking the whistle blower who leaked the existence of the secret mailing list.

Comments

Re:I wrote this essay over a year ago...

[CrayDrygu]

"You just said all opinions are equally valid. Lots of people are of the opinion that it is both true, and science."

If I may respond on his behalf...

Opinions can be wrong. We should give equal weight to opinions that cannot be proven wrong. However, when an opinion can be proven wrong, there is no longer reason to consider it. In this specific case, it's very easy to prove that Intelligent Design is not science, because "science" has a rigid and well-known definition which ID does not meet.

Science is defined (roughly) as "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena."

Intelligent Design lacks what may be the two most important qualities of a scientific pursuit (though all parts are important). First, there is (and can be) no observation. All processes involved in Intelligent Design are over and done with, and can no longer be observed. Second, it lacks experimental investigation. There is no known way to investigate or experiment on the ideas put forth by Intelligent Design proponents.

Don't mistake this for a value judgement, by the way. I'm not saying that Intelligent Design is incorrect. But there is no way to prove it correct or incorrect through experimentation and observation, and therefore, it is not "science."

Evolution, while not directly observable on the macroevolutionary "origin of species" scale, can be observed on a small scale. Microevolution is observable and predictably repeatable, those observations can be extrapolated out to a larger scale, and the results of that can be compared to a factual record of past species (the fossil record) to determine their validity. It does match up, which lends it credence, however we do not yet have evidence of it actually happening, so macroevolution can't yet be called a real theory.

We may never be able to definitively prove that macroevolution explains where we all come from, but just because we can't prove it, doesn't mean it isn't science. We can prove how likely it is (or isn't) through observation of the process on a smaller scale, identification and description of the process and its traits, experimental investigation of its effects on various lifeforms, and theoretical explanation of how it could apply on a larger scale.

So, again, saying that something is "not science" doesn't mean that it's wrong, it just means that we can't prove it's right.

Re:wiki == worthless

[randomaxe]

I've got serveral area's of expertise...

I've encountered asshat's like this before...


I take it that "proper use of apostrophes" is not one of your areas of expertise.