Don't misunderstand the playing field; "the admins" (or as some might say the evil cabal) do not have the right to remove insignificant articles, nor can they change the rules/strictly enforce them to their whims. Wikipedia operates on the idea of reaching a consensus among good-faith users who understand the current mechanisms.
What frustrates me lately is the attitude of a large number of editors who follow the mantra "Either facts are sourced or I delete them on sight, and if an article has fewer than x sources, it gets the axe one way or another". To me, that's a destructive attitude and non-condusive to covering the wide spectrum of knowledge.
Not sure what the academic misconduct policies at your university were, but nowadays (at least where I go to school) doing what you describe carries a minimum penalty of failure in the course and a one year suspension from studies. In one of my courses, the prof claims to have retroactively failed and suspended students that shared their completed assignments from previous terms with students taking the current offering.
PPC for mac is not dead. Far from it. There are a ton of PPC macs that are only 2 years old: this is what makes universal binaries so great. Add to that the fact that the useable (read:not too far behind the times) life of most macs is something like 5-7 years, and the fact that these so-called "dead" PPC's are still under warranty, still being replaced with PPC's if they break etc, one realises that they are not dead. It's too bad that Apple decided not to produce the tools to develop for the iPhone on PPC, clearly they have the technology and it would be possible (and probably easy) as evidenced by the universal binary creation by both PPC's and Intels.
Carlin said neither median nor mean. Why would you start an argument about definitions of averages? Are we in high-school? Perhaps you're simply demonstrating his point?
The other interesting thing to note is that the release of new, non-core material for 3.5ed will quickly dwindle to zero as all the independant publishers latch on to the new version. That's somewhat of a problem for those who want to continually expand their compatible game-play universe as the campaign moves forward (a big example of that for my group was the release of the psionics ruleset, a new baddie to face and develop strategy for without the need for a new core).
This sounds a lot like my experiences. Taking an Electrical Engineering/Computer Science degree (Eng Phys CPSC extension), I wonder how many 'code-monkeys' actually know how logic is executed or why instructions are in 8 (or 2^n) byte chunks.
Regardless, I think the watering-down of the curriculum is occuring in every discipline. Everybody is told that university is the place to go to get a good job; instead of weeding out those that don't have what it takes, the universities have made it easier to get in and easier to get through.
I think what you describe is definitely an anomoly (perhaps when you set up your POP3, originally you set Gmail to delete the forwarded messages?).
As for myself, I've never had a false positive with Gmail (as far as I know) and I haven't had a spam message appear in my inbox for at least a year. I also used get close to a thousand spam messages every 30 days (which has nearly halved recently), as far as I can tell that's because my email is available in the whois database for my domain registration.
Yeah, no one would be silly enough to rename "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" (NMR) into "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" (MRI) despite referring to the nucleus of the cell not the nucleus of an atom, nevermind anything radioactive.
Except it does indeed refer to the nucleus of the atom, not the cell. Specifically it refers to the alteration of the spin of the protons in a material and then the observation of their decay back to equilibrium state with the decay time being unique to different elements (as a very rough explanation).
It's not a good idea pretend you know what you're talking about on slashdot...
The reason wikipedia doesn't care whether you're trained in the field or not when you make an edit, is because it doesn't matter. Wikipedia is not about gathering knowledge from peoples' brains, it's about gathering knowledge from reliable sources. This makes editing wikipedia mostly clerical work, and this above all else is what I think scares people away from editing wikipedia. Don't get me wrong, having a good knowledge of the subject you're editing makes the clerical work a lot easier, but the burden of evidence is exactly the same.
I've read things like Steven Hawking's books. That does not make me qualified to interpret String Theory.
Good of you to realize that, but wikipedia doesn't want people to "interpret String Theory". It wants people to present String Theory in a well sourced manner. These are two different things, in fact interpreting anything and then putting it on wikipedia is expressly discouraged (because it often qualifies as "Original Research" - see here).
I think you may be falling into the trap of expecting every article to be at the same level of completion. Just because it's stable, doesn't mean it's complete. When it's complete it will be rated Good or Featured based on the reliability of the content which is based on the reliability of the sources cited, and the balance of opposing views presented (if indeed the subject has them).
First of all, understand that it it not a "dichotomy" at all, let alone a false one. It's a comparison, and a very valid one at that.
Secondly, I would argue that it is far easier to distinguish what bias is present in a Good or Featured article on wikipedia than it is in print media. You can quickly scan the discussion page or check any of the numerous references (which are all requirements for articles to reach either status).
Comparing non-Good/Featured articles to print media makes no sense: the article has not reached maturity, which is equivalent to an print-media article which hasn't been written/reviewed yet.
Thirdly, I would contest that printed encyclopaedias are uniform in their biases. They are put together by scores of writers and edited by teams of editors, each with a different agenda or perspective.
I really wish/. posts would stop asking if wikipedia is "trustworthy" or "reliable". All of the cynics reply in chorus "no, it can't be because X can vandalize article Y, and group Z can gang up and bully topic Q into having systemic bias omg wtf @!$!".
No kidding. This happens. Guess what? It happens in print encyclopaedias also. Replace vandalism with plain old errors, replace the systemic bias of group Z with that of the editors and voila.
Then you have the camp of "ex-editors" who are really nothing more than bad editors who haven't taken the time to understand what the mission of wikipedia actually is, rather than what their contrived notions lead them to believe it is who say things like "I got scared away because what I added which was so clearly invaluable to me was removed by a long-time editor which clearly means I'm right and they're doodie heads with an agenda omg wtf @!$!".
What they don't realise is what they add has to be verifiable from reliable, secondary sources, with no new opinions of their own. Wikipedia seeks to add established analysis, not what you perceive to be right. And this is exactly what makes wikipedia more reliable than any print encyclopaedia - it has inline cited references to back up it's claims. Any part of wikipedia that does not yet have these inline citations (that anybody can and should follow up on) should still be considered works in progress - consider finding the source yourself!
So I guess my question is, why do you insist we hold wikipedia to a higher standard than other encyclopaedias? Stop being afraid of dynamic content.
I think the point he's trying to convey is that a new computer couldn't do what he set out to do, without delving into the technical aspects. Automatix and Easy Ubuntu were not included with what he bought from Dell.
Whereas if he had bought an OSX or XP machine, such things would have been dealt with on a clickthrough basis, without the user so much as having to think about whether to click "ok" or "cancel".
I love linux, it can just become counterproductive when you spend as much of your time trying to find drivers and workarounds for compatibility issues as you do actually accomplishing what you want to accomplish.
Well, our robotics course was on top of normal lectures, and after only 3 terms of university at that. The amount of knowledge they shoved into us through that course I found to be phenomenal, and an incredible experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't misunderstand the playing field; "the admins" (or as some might say the evil cabal) do not have the right to remove insignificant articles, nor can they change the rules/strictly enforce them to their whims. Wikipedia operates on the idea of reaching a consensus among good-faith users who understand the current mechanisms.
What frustrates me lately is the attitude of a large number of editors who follow the mantra "Either facts are sourced or I delete them on sight, and if an article has fewer than x sources, it gets the axe one way or another". To me, that's a destructive attitude and non-condusive to covering the wide spectrum of knowledge.
Not sure what the academic misconduct policies at your university were, but nowadays (at least where I go to school) doing what you describe carries a minimum penalty of failure in the course and a one year suspension from studies. In one of my courses, the prof claims to have retroactively failed and suspended students that shared their completed assignments from previous terms with students taking the current offering.
PPC for mac is not dead. Far from it. There are a ton of PPC macs that are only 2 years old: this is what makes universal binaries so great. Add to that the fact that the useable (read:not too far behind the times) life of most macs is something like 5-7 years, and the fact that these so-called "dead" PPC's are still under warranty, still being replaced with PPC's if they break etc, one realises that they are not dead. It's too bad that Apple decided not to produce the tools to develop for the iPhone on PPC, clearly they have the technology and it would be possible (and probably easy) as evidenced by the universal binary creation by both PPC's and Intels.
Carlin said neither median nor mean. Why would you start an argument about definitions of averages? Are we in high-school? Perhaps you're simply demonstrating his point?
The other interesting thing to note is that the release of new, non-core material for 3.5ed will quickly dwindle to zero as all the independant publishers latch on to the new version. That's somewhat of a problem for those who want to continually expand their compatible game-play universe as the campaign moves forward (a big example of that for my group was the release of the psionics ruleset, a new baddie to face and develop strategy for without the need for a new core).
For those that are too lazy to search for it themselves, here is the permalink to that revision.
You're asking if people on slashdot rant at any opportunity, even if it means completely ignoring that a joke was made in good humour?
You must be new here.
This sounds a lot like my experiences. Taking an Electrical Engineering/Computer Science degree (Eng Phys CPSC extension), I wonder how many 'code-monkeys' actually know how logic is executed or why instructions are in 8 (or 2^n) byte chunks.
Regardless, I think the watering-down of the curriculum is occuring in every discipline. Everybody is told that university is the place to go to get a good job; instead of weeding out those that don't have what it takes, the universities have made it easier to get in and easier to get through.
I think what you describe is definitely an anomoly (perhaps when you set up your POP3, originally you set Gmail to delete the forwarded messages?).
As for myself, I've never had a false positive with Gmail (as far as I know) and I haven't had a spam message appear in my inbox for at least a year. I also used get close to a thousand spam messages every 30 days (which has nearly halved recently), as far as I can tell that's because my email is available in the whois database for my domain registration.
Spam is essentially a non-issue for me...
It's not a good idea pretend you know what you're talking about on slashdot...
Just because it's covered in a computerworld article doesn't mean it merits reposting... dupe link here
The reason wikipedia doesn't care whether you're trained in the field or not when you make an edit, is because it doesn't matter. Wikipedia is not about gathering knowledge from peoples' brains, it's about gathering knowledge from reliable sources. This makes editing wikipedia mostly clerical work, and this above all else is what I think scares people away from editing wikipedia. Don't get me wrong, having a good knowledge of the subject you're editing makes the clerical work a lot easier, but the burden of evidence is exactly the same.
I've read things like Steven Hawking's books. That does not make me qualified to interpret String Theory.
Good of you to realize that, but wikipedia doesn't want people to "interpret String Theory". It wants people to present String Theory in a well sourced manner. These are two different things, in fact interpreting anything and then putting it on wikipedia is expressly discouraged (because it often qualifies as "Original Research" - see here).
I think you may be falling into the trap of expecting every article to be at the same level of completion. Just because it's stable, doesn't mean it's complete. When it's complete it will be rated Good or Featured based on the reliability of the content which is based on the reliability of the sources cited, and the balance of opposing views presented (if indeed the subject has them).
First of all, understand that it it not a "dichotomy" at all, let alone a false one. It's a comparison, and a very valid one at that.
Secondly, I would argue that it is far easier to distinguish what bias is present in a Good or Featured article on wikipedia than it is in print media. You can quickly scan the discussion page or check any of the numerous references (which are all requirements for articles to reach either status).
Comparing non-Good/Featured articles to print media makes no sense: the article has not reached maturity, which is equivalent to an print-media article which hasn't been written/reviewed yet.
Thirdly, I would contest that printed encyclopaedias are uniform in their biases. They are put together by scores of writers and edited by teams of editors, each with a different agenda or perspective.
I really wish /. posts would stop asking if wikipedia is "trustworthy" or "reliable". All of the cynics reply in chorus "no, it can't be because X can vandalize article Y, and group Z can gang up and bully topic Q into having systemic bias omg wtf @!$!".
No kidding. This happens. Guess what? It happens in print encyclopaedias also. Replace vandalism with plain old errors, replace the systemic bias of group Z with that of the editors and voila.
Then you have the camp of "ex-editors" who are really nothing more than bad editors who haven't taken the time to understand what the mission of wikipedia actually is, rather than what their contrived notions lead them to believe it is who say things like "I got scared away because what I added which was so clearly invaluable to me was removed by a long-time editor which clearly means I'm right and they're doodie heads with an agenda omg wtf @!$!".
What they don't realise is what they add has to be verifiable from reliable, secondary sources, with no new opinions of their own. Wikipedia seeks to add established analysis, not what you perceive to be right. And this is exactly what makes wikipedia more reliable than any print encyclopaedia - it has inline cited references to back up it's claims. Any part of wikipedia that does not yet have these inline citations (that anybody can and should follow up on) should still be considered works in progress - consider finding the source yourself!
So I guess my question is, why do you insist we hold wikipedia to a higher standard than other encyclopaedias? Stop being afraid of dynamic content.
I think the point he's trying to convey is that a new computer couldn't do what he set out to do, without delving into the technical aspects. Automatix and Easy Ubuntu were not included with what he bought from Dell.
Whereas if he had bought an OSX or XP machine, such things would have been dealt with on a clickthrough basis, without the user so much as having to think about whether to click "ok" or "cancel".
I love linux, it can just become counterproductive when you spend as much of your time trying to find drivers and workarounds for compatibility issues as you do actually accomplishing what you want to accomplish.
Well, our robotics course was on top of normal lectures, and after only 3 terms of university at that. The amount of knowledge they shoved into us through that course I found to be phenomenal, and an incredible experience.
~Dr. Claw Team Member