Unfortunately, your entire comment is based on a straw man argument that all programming will be done this way. Since that's not what's being proposed, your entire comment is misaimed.
Is there anything that Blake Thompson has done other than produce The Dave Ramsey Show that has made him notable?
If not, then everything that makes Blake Thompson notable is already described in a Wikipedia article, and there's no point in adding all the same information to a new article just so the article can have his name on it.
(Note: I readily admit I have no knowledge of Thompson or the show he produces and so there may be a perfectly good answer to the question "What besides this show makes Thompson notable?" that I don't happen to know. However, back before I gave up Wikipedia in disgust I had to explain, many many many times, that if X's only notability is their participation in Y, it's much better to make the title "X" a redirect to the article "Y" than to make them two separate articles which can fall out of sync as people update one but forget to update the other.)
It sounds as if Reagle based all his work on the false premise that Wikipedia actually follows the rules it claims to follow.
In the infamous Scientology arbitration case (WP:ARBSCI) the ArbCom was ready to punish a well-respected user and admin because he did not speedy-delete an article that they thought should have been speedy-deleted. The rules on speedy deletion have some gray areas, but they also have areas which are starkly clear, such as an article which has survived an AfD discussion is not a candidate for speedy deletion. Speedy deletion was introduced as an alternative to the lengthier process, AfD (Articles for Deletion), only because the lengthier process was overkill for very simple cases like blatant hoaxes and unambiguous copyright infringement -- cases where no user with knowledge of Wikipedia's standards could seriously dispute that the article merited deletion. But the only way that an article survives an AfD discussion is if a sufficient number of users do dispute that the article should be deleted. So if an article has survived AfD, even if you think the AfD reached the wrong conclusion by not deleting the article, it was obviously not one of the simple cases that speedy deletion was intended for. And yet the ArbCom was actually ready to sanction this long-time admin for not violating the rules to speedy-delete an article that had survived four such discussions!
That barely even scratches the surface of what the ArbCom did wrong in that case, and I'm sure that was hardly the only case where they committed such egregious violations. ArbCom is supposed to be the "Supreme Court" of Wikipedia and yet if they're not only not enforcing the rules but trying to punish users for following the rules then there's no reason to think that the rules are being followed past the point of convenience anywhere on Wikipedia.
Without a study no one knows how prevalent the disorder might be.
We do know something about how prevalent the disorder is, or more accurately, how prevalent it isn't. Besides Hannah Poling, there have only been four other known cases.
If you think that's a risk which comes even close to approximating the risks from vaccine-preventable diseases, I think you don't know what you're talking about.
The problem is that class-action litigation is also an industry, and that industry is just as capable of commissioning "studies" not to discover scientific truth but to create a useful appearance.
In fact, I'd say litigation is more capable of doing so, given that they can win victories far more easily with useful appearances. If "Big Doohickey" discovers that doohickeys causes a serious risk of seizure, they will have to try to keep everyone fooled that there's no danger, for as long as they're selling doohickeys, and they know that at any time, some researcher will look for themselves and discover the truth. By contrast, if the law firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe says "hey, we've got a bunch of loonballs here who claim doohickeys are causing seizures; I think we could rake in a lot of cash from the pockets of Big Doohickey if we represent them in court," they can commission scientific-looking studies which appear to show a doohickey-seizure connection, and there's probably less than twenty people in the world who have to be sold on the idea that these studies have some sort of validity: those are the judge(s) or jur(ies) hearing the case. And they only have to keep up the appearance long enough to get a favorable verdict or settlement.
The litigation industry definitely produced dodgy scholarship to push a lawsuit in the case of the MMR vaccine (think Andrew Wakefield)) and there's evidence strongly suggesting that it has done so in the case of the alleged cellphone-cancer effect. For example, take a look at the Myung meta-review of cell-phone/cancer studies, where the author declared that even though the overall review of the chosen studies had failed to establish any sort of convincing evidence that cell phones caused cancer, a "sub-group" of "high-quality" studies established a "significant positive association". What the meta-review may have failed to call attention to, however, was that seven out of the eight "high-quality" studies were all done by the same researchers, a group led by Dr. Lennart Hardell, and that Hardell is frequently retained as an expert witness in lawsuits against cell-phone companies. Just because "the cellphone industry" isn't the industry funding a study, doesn't mean that study isn't funded by an industry or twisted to serve that industry's agenda.
Actually, a large part of the problem is that Wikipedia always has been a Cathedral.
Cathedrals are venues where the decisions are made by a person or persons in a position of near-absolute power over the cathedral's output. That elite position exists on Wikipedia too. It's called The Last Guy To Edit.
In wiki theory, it doesn't matter that every person to edit, at the time they are editing, are acting as the Supreme Ruler of the Cathedral. The theory is that any abuse of this power will be corrected because: 1) some other person who knows how to edit will come along; 2) that person will see that the Last Guy To Edit committed some sort of wrongdoing; 3) that person will become the new Last Guy To Edit and undo anything bad done by the previous Last Guy To Edit.
In practice, however, there is no guarantee that 1, 2 and 3 will happen -- at least not within any time-frame that would count to a reasonable person as "success". The more articles Wikipedia adds, in fact, the greater the chance grows that the correction process will fail at any given step, because the number of good editors who can and will do corrections is not growing as fast as the number of articles, or even as fast as the number of poor editors who, through design or lack of ability, will create situations that need correction.
Wikipedia can't be truly said to follow Bazaar principles as long as one person can come along and unilaterally undo what all the rest of the Bazaar is doing.
Your own response really casts doubt on your claims.
You claim that even when you read things you disagree with, you generally find "a nugget or two of useful information I didn't know about previously and from which I can benefit either directly or through researching further", and proceed to go into a long comical diatribe based on the implicit assumption this one brief "interaction" of ours entirely sums up our entire beings. Oh, yes, I'm sure you know everything about my information processing habits based on one Slashdot comment, and I'm sure that your extrapolation of that to the results of a century spent in a library is an entirely accurate non-caricature.
Yet you fail to even mention the Myung meta-analysis which I described, which (similar to the GQ article) divided up studies, announced that a certain sub-group of those studies presented an alarming result, and failed to show adequate consideration to the possibility that sub-grouping in the fashion they did introduced a co-founder. I'm sorry, should I have buried that nugget in piles of conspiracy-mongering clap-trap, so that you would be able to recognize it as information?
You also fail to respond in any meaningful fashion to my exposure of the original article's misconception of the Frey effect, instead pulling what I like to call "the haystack gambit." "Oh, so you argue that A, do you? Well, you're wrong! You're so totally wrong! I am not even obligated to give specific reasons why anyone should believe that you're wrong; I will just tell you that the proof that you are absolutely wrong is contained in Wikipedia article X/somewhere in the complete writings of Y/on the side of a needle located in haystack Z! Now you cannot rebut me without poring through everything I chose to throw at you in order to try and figure out what the heck my argument actually is."
If you think that every moldering garbage heap of thought has in it, somewhere, some tiny little scrap which, even if it is not a scrap of truth, at least provides the material for a moment's consideration, you may be technically correct (or perhaps you just haven't spent enough time on the Internet.)
But as one grows older and learns to value one's time, one realizes that not every garbage heap contains a reward worth the effort of digging it out.
I was going to RTFA but it's densely packed in an unfriendly typeface and when I opened it up, I immediately saw warning signs of conspiracy-mongering (Hey, this guy publishes an "investigative newsletter" called Microwave News! And he has a doctorate in environmental policy from MIT! That means if he says that the science is 100% solid about cell phones causing harm, he must be right, because God knows no one who got a doctorate at MIT ever got convinced of some cockamamie theory and started "investigative newsletters" to pursue some non-existent threat!) and research fail ("The "hearing," however, didn't happen via normal sound waves perceived through the ear. It occurred somewhere in the brain itself, as EM waves interacted with the brain's cells, which generate tiny electrical fields." First of all, any time someone mentions the Frey effect, 80% of the time you're about to hear schizophrenic ranting about government mind control transmissions. Second of all, the author seems to have made up the theory that the Frey effect happens because of EM waves interacting with brain cells; it seems quite inconsistent with Frey's own findings that there were some individuals who could not hear sounds around the frequency of 5Kc who also could not hear the "rf sounds". If the Frey effect bypassed the ear and directly stimulated the brain, why would anyone who had a brain be unable to detect this stimulus? Why would the people who were unable to detect this stimulus also be those with known deficiencies in their ears? Coincidence?)
Anyways, I suspected that what I would find in the article was a situation similar to the Myung meta-review of cell-phone/cancer studies, where the author declared that even though the overall review of the chosen studies had failed to establish any sort of convincing evidence that cell phones caused cancer, a "sub-group" of "high-quality" studies established a "significant positive association". What the meta-review may have failed to call attention to, however, was that seven out of the eight "high-quality" studies were all done by the same researchers, a group led by Dr. Lennart Hardell, and that Hardell is frequently retained as an expert witness in lawsuits against cell-phone companies. I wouldn't be surprised if at least 75% of the "independently funded" studies in the GQ article are also by researchers who profit handsomely from testifying in similar lawsuits. People talk about how they can't trust any studies done by "industry", but they're naive to think that litigation itself is not an industry.
By the same logic I should get all my information on nuclear power plants from the National Enquirer, because when was the last time you heard of nuclear power companies buying advertising in the Enquirer?
Well, you could try wiggling out of this one on a technicality, insisting on an article that is provably wrong in key facts and has been for more than a week, rather than one where that exact situation occurred but the article was later corrected after more than a week. But I'm sure you wouldn't do that, since that would be an artificial limitation.
* the city and the county where the murders occurred; * the years where they occurred; * the existence of a third murder; * the year of Pitchfork's confession; * the date and year of Pitchfork's sentencing; * the name of the initial incorrect suspect; * the affiliation of the scientist who developed the technique that identified Pitchfork; * how Pitchfork's ruse to defeat forensic testing failed.
That's a bit more than "spelling errors and questionable references."
Of course, of course. They mean "Deletionist" in the exact same way that those fulminating about "those power-hungry deletionists" mean "deletionist". Sure.
And the hip-hop group "Niggaz With Attitudes" -- they mean "nigger" when they say it, exactly the same way that the Ku Klux Klan means "nigger" when they say it. Sure.
You know, in all the time I've spent at Wikipedia, I've yet to see even one instance of this fabulous mythical beast, the "deletionist", whose identifying characteristic is that he wants things deleted for the sake of deletion.
Have I heard reports of deletionists at work? Why, of course I have! But like the reports of Bigfoot or the Mothman or the Jersey Devil, they never quite pan out. The "deletionist" is a vicious, self-important dictator, who wants to wipe out someone's hard work just to prove his own power. What always seems to be found at the site where the "deletionist" was supposedly sighted was an editor who thought the article was a hoax (frequently because none of Wikipedia's rules about PROVIDE YOUR DAMN SOURCES were paid attention to) or an editor who thinks the subject has failed to demonstrate encyclopedic notability (your favorite restaurant may be a great place, but Wikipedia can't afford to give an article to every single "great place" in the world; what makes this one merit an article?) or who had some other concern about the article.
In short, when editors suggest that an article should be deleted, they usually have article-specific reasons for thinking it should be deleted. Sometimes those reasons are wrong; I've seen those reasons be VERY wrong. But this stereotype of "the deletionist" is a straw man and the most frequent use of it I've seen has been by people who didn't know what they were actually doing on Wikipedia, trying to blame those who did know what they were doing for their failure to get their way.
So, logically, the solution would be to distort the name of the band so that their name-brand does not increase as a result of the media buzz, right? Shame on you for pulling this stunt, BookBerry!
The rate of accuracy of the system can never exceed that of the humans involved in the process. If a human technician calls a non-match a match or a match a non-match 1 in 200 times (and though I can't remember where I read it, I've read that that's the actual figure obtained by reviewed the records of DNA techs) then the chance that two DNA samples would be said to match each other if they were not actually from the same donor are not "1 in 668 jillion" but... 1 in 200.
That's a load of garbage. The topic of "belief systems that have led good people to do evil things" does not begin and end with religion. Or do you think that the only people who supported the regime of Nazi Germany were those who subscribed to the religion that the Nazi Party tried to cobble together? Do you actually expect us to believe that out of all the millions of people who in some small way made willing contributions to the evils of the Third Reich, not one of them was an atheist?
Hear, hear. The Freezoners tend to be pretty decent people. Most of them got into Scientology because they actually believed Scientology's promise about how "our goal is a world without war, crime and insanity." And most of them get out because they catch on that the Church of Scientology isn't living up to those lofty goals. Those who still practice the belief system after they get out of the organization generally do so in a general moral, socially positive way, trying to keep true to "Hubbard's ideals". So what if the evidence shows that L. Ron Hubbard himself didn't live up to "Hubbard's ideals"? It wouldn't be the first time that someone trying to live up to a role model did far better than the role model actually did.
Admittedly, I did not pay close enough attention to the tacked on denial, by proxy, on behalf of Jimmy Wales. Whether it was "tacked on" is irrelevant.
Whether it was "by proxy" is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that you misrepresented it.
If you make an entire post whose whole point is "Hey, if you look really carefully, you'll see that the Foundation used some slippery wording to make it sound like they denied Merkey's allegations, but they didn't actually deny Merkey's allegations!" and it turns out that the 'slippery wording' is entirely in your imagination and your entire analysis is based on your failure to look 'really carefully', then I don't see why you should get any attention when you follow up your blatantly non-factual misrepresentations with ad hominem arguments attempting to push the same ideas.
That's changing the subject. Explaining why you do not believe the Wikimedia Foundation's statement does not answer the question of why you misrepresented the Wikimedia Foundation's statement.
This post makes the false claim that the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation was in a carefully worded form that did not deny the allegations against Jimmy Wales.
This post corrects the falsehood of the parent, pointing out that in fact the statement did quite definitely deny the allegations against Wales.
Why is the post making the false claim rated more highly than the post telling the truth? Anyone can look at the statement of the Wikimedia Foundation and see that MSTCrow5429's interpretation of it is entirely false.
"Next to that, the problem with Spitzer is that he embezzled money to pay for his prostitution."
Mind citing a source on that? If Spitzer was even suspected of any financial dishonesty, it would be an even bigger news story than his involvement with prostitution. But typing "Spitzer" and "embezzle" into Google News gets exactly one result, and that result does not contain any allegations of embezzlement.
I think you may have done your news reading too hastily.
I made the mistake of thinking from the headline that this was an actual story. But if only the Sydney Morning Herald had done due diligence and checked out who Jeff Vernon Merkey is, they'd realize that it's no more of a story than "Homeless man pushing shopping cart insists that Vatican implanted electrodes in his pancreas for mind control." The SMH story mentions at the very end of the article that Merkey has been in several lawsuits; one wishes they'd looked more closely at the Novell v. Timpanogos Research Group, Inc. suit where Merkey was a primary defendant. The judge's findings of fact include that Merkey had "copied whole cloth... the work of Novell" (71) and falsely represented it as "prepared "starting from 'a clean piece of paper'"" (81); had "spent two hours describing the Tapestry technology and... explained how Novell had invested $15 million in their new company... all aspects of this presentation were essentially dishonest as the technology was Novell's Wolf Mountain technology not TRG's and Novell had not invested any money in the new company" (84); had falsely represented to an investor that "70 senior architects and developers at Novell had resigned to join TRG" when the truth was "it only hired a handful" (100); had offered contradictory testimony as to the location of a laptop computer whose hard drive was believed to show evidence of Merkey's misappropriation of trade secrets (112); had offered no less than four different explanations of how the hard drive of that computer came to have been smashed to bits (116); and concluded as a Finding of Fact that "Merkey is not just prone to exaggeration, he also is and can be deceptive, not only to his adversaries, but also to his own partners, his business associates and to the court. He deliberately describes his own, separate reality." (124). I highly suggest reading the whole thing to get a good feel for just how readily Merkey lies, and how little anything he says can be expected to reflect the truth.
Calling this claim "the most damning [against Wales] yet," as the SMH does, ignores the fact that it is coming from a thoroughly untrustworthy source.
When it's such a poor parody that a reasonable person might be led to believe untrue things on its basis. If it wasn't so, then we would have, effectively, no laws against defamation; I could simply print on my blog "Daniel Lyons, also known as 'Fake Steve Jobs', was arrested today on charges of sexual deviancy and corruption of minors as he attempted to flee to Mexico" and then when the lawsuits came my way I could just simply blink innocently and say "Why... didn't you understand that was parody?? Surely it's not my fault if the majority of people who read what I wrote did not see any reason to think I was telling other than the truth!"
Back when it was possible -- just barely -- for an intelligent person to think SCO might still have a case that they were just coincidentally showing no proof of, Dan Lyons was among those trying to portray SCO as in all likelihood a bunch of swell guys who had produced something of value, only to see it ripped off, and were now simply seeking just compensation for having been ripped off.
That in itself is proof of nothing except excessive credulity.
What makes Lyons a two-faced mealymouth is that in the same time period he wrote the infamous "Linux's Hit Men" article, in which he excoriated the Free Software Foundation for seeking compensation/compliance in cases where swell programmers had produced something of value and put it under the GPL only to see the fruits of their labors ripped off. The Foundation, Lyons tells the reader, "doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house, or at the very least share it with cloners... maybe, as some suggest, the foundation wants GPL-covered code to creep into commercial products so it can use GPL to force open those products." Lyons' final line? "Such a pity, comrade."
So, let's sum up. When it's a commercial company which claims it has been ripped off (even if it's actively refusing to show anyone its evidence of the alleged ripoff under reasonable conditions) Lyons thinks it's perfectly okay for them to demand huge financial recompense. When it's open source coders that get ripped off, however, Lyons thinks it's pretty jerky for anyone to actually make the rippers-off comply with the license for the code they chose to use -- if not some sort of sinister conspiracy.
Gee, I can't think why anyone would doubt the sincerity of Lyons' love for Linux and open source.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, your entire comment is based on a straw man argument that all programming will be done this way. Since that's not what's being proposed, your entire comment is misaimed.
To play devil's advocate here:
Is there anything that Blake Thompson has done other than produce The Dave Ramsey Show that has made him notable?
If not, then everything that makes Blake Thompson notable is already described in a Wikipedia article, and there's no point in adding all the same information to a new article just so the article can have his name on it.
(Note: I readily admit I have no knowledge of Thompson or the show he produces and so there may be a perfectly good answer to the question "What besides this show makes Thompson notable?" that I don't happen to know. However, back before I gave up Wikipedia in disgust I had to explain, many many many times, that if X's only notability is their participation in Y, it's much better to make the title "X" a redirect to the article "Y" than to make them two separate articles which can fall out of sync as people update one but forget to update the other.)
It sounds as if Reagle based all his work on the false premise that Wikipedia actually follows the rules it claims to follow.
In the infamous Scientology arbitration case (WP:ARBSCI) the ArbCom was ready to punish a well-respected user and admin because he did not speedy-delete an article that they thought should have been speedy-deleted. The rules on speedy deletion have some gray areas, but they also have areas which are starkly clear, such as an article which has survived an AfD discussion is not a candidate for speedy deletion. Speedy deletion was introduced as an alternative to the lengthier process, AfD (Articles for Deletion), only because the lengthier process was overkill for very simple cases like blatant hoaxes and unambiguous copyright infringement -- cases where no user with knowledge of Wikipedia's standards could seriously dispute that the article merited deletion. But the only way that an article survives an AfD discussion is if a sufficient number of users do dispute that the article should be deleted. So if an article has survived AfD, even if you think the AfD reached the wrong conclusion by not deleting the article, it was obviously not one of the simple cases that speedy deletion was intended for. And yet the ArbCom was actually ready to sanction this long-time admin for not violating the rules to speedy-delete an article that had survived four such discussions!
That barely even scratches the surface of what the ArbCom did wrong in that case, and I'm sure that was hardly the only case where they committed such egregious violations. ArbCom is supposed to be the "Supreme Court" of Wikipedia and yet if they're not only not enforcing the rules but trying to punish users for following the rules then there's no reason to think that the rules are being followed past the point of convenience anywhere on Wikipedia.
We do know something about how prevalent the disorder is, or more accurately, how prevalent it isn't. Besides Hannah Poling, there have only been four other known cases.
If you think that's a risk which comes even close to approximating the risks from vaccine-preventable diseases, I think you don't know what you're talking about.
The problem is that class-action litigation is also an industry, and that industry is just as capable of commissioning "studies" not to discover scientific truth but to create a useful appearance.
In fact, I'd say litigation is more capable of doing so, given that they can win victories far more easily with useful appearances. If "Big Doohickey" discovers that doohickeys causes a serious risk of seizure, they will have to try to keep everyone fooled that there's no danger, for as long as they're selling doohickeys, and they know that at any time, some researcher will look for themselves and discover the truth. By contrast, if the law firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe says "hey, we've got a bunch of loonballs here who claim doohickeys are causing seizures; I think we could rake in a lot of cash from the pockets of Big Doohickey if we represent them in court," they can commission scientific-looking studies which appear to show a doohickey-seizure connection, and there's probably less than twenty people in the world who have to be sold on the idea that these studies have some sort of validity: those are the judge(s) or jur(ies) hearing the case. And they only have to keep up the appearance long enough to get a favorable verdict or settlement.
The litigation industry definitely produced dodgy scholarship to push a lawsuit in the case of the MMR vaccine (think Andrew Wakefield)) and there's evidence strongly suggesting that it has done so in the case of the alleged cellphone-cancer effect. For example, take a look at the Myung meta-review of cell-phone/cancer studies, where the author declared that even though the overall review of the chosen studies had failed to establish any sort of convincing evidence that cell phones caused cancer, a "sub-group" of "high-quality" studies established a "significant positive association". What the meta-review may have failed to call attention to, however, was that seven out of the eight "high-quality" studies were all done by the same researchers, a group led by Dr. Lennart Hardell, and that Hardell is frequently retained as an expert witness in lawsuits against cell-phone companies. Just because "the cellphone industry" isn't the industry funding a study, doesn't mean that study isn't funded by an industry or twisted to serve that industry's agenda.
Actually, a large part of the problem is that Wikipedia always has been a Cathedral.
Cathedrals are venues where the decisions are made by a person or persons in a position of near-absolute power over the cathedral's output. That elite position exists on Wikipedia too. It's called The Last Guy To Edit.
In wiki theory, it doesn't matter that every person to edit, at the time they are editing, are acting as the Supreme Ruler of the Cathedral. The theory is that any abuse of this power will be corrected because:
1) some other person who knows how to edit will come along;
2) that person will see that the Last Guy To Edit committed some sort of wrongdoing;
3) that person will become the new Last Guy To Edit and undo anything bad done by the previous Last Guy To Edit.
In practice, however, there is no guarantee that 1, 2 and 3 will happen -- at least not within any time-frame that would count to a reasonable person as "success". The more articles Wikipedia adds, in fact, the greater the chance grows that the correction process will fail at any given step, because the number of good editors who can and will do corrections is not growing as fast as the number of articles, or even as fast as the number of poor editors who, through design or lack of ability, will create situations that need correction.
Wikipedia can't be truly said to follow Bazaar principles as long as one person can come along and unilaterally undo what all the rest of the Bazaar is doing.
Your own response really casts doubt on your claims.
You claim that even when you read things you disagree with, you generally find "a nugget or two of useful information I didn't know about previously and from which I can benefit either directly or through researching further", and proceed to go into a long comical diatribe based on the implicit assumption this one brief "interaction" of ours entirely sums up our entire beings. Oh, yes, I'm sure you know everything about my information processing habits based on one Slashdot comment, and I'm sure that your extrapolation of that to the results of a century spent in a library is an entirely accurate non-caricature.
Yet you fail to even mention the Myung meta-analysis which I described, which (similar to the GQ article) divided up studies, announced that a certain sub-group of those studies presented an alarming result, and failed to show adequate consideration to the possibility that sub-grouping in the fashion they did introduced a co-founder. I'm sorry, should I have buried that nugget in piles of conspiracy-mongering clap-trap, so that you would be able to recognize it as information?
You also fail to respond in any meaningful fashion to my exposure of the original article's misconception of the Frey effect, instead pulling what I like to call "the haystack gambit." "Oh, so you argue that A, do you? Well, you're wrong! You're so totally wrong! I am not even obligated to give specific reasons why anyone should believe that you're wrong; I will just tell you that the proof that you are absolutely wrong is contained in Wikipedia article X/somewhere in the complete writings of Y/on the side of a needle located in haystack Z! Now you cannot rebut me without poring through everything I chose to throw at you in order to try and figure out what the heck my argument actually is."
If you think that every moldering garbage heap of thought has in it, somewhere, some tiny little scrap which, even if it is not a scrap of truth, at least provides the material for a moment's consideration, you may be technically correct (or perhaps you just haven't spent enough time on the Internet.)
But as one grows older and learns to value one's time, one realizes that not every garbage heap contains a reward worth the effort of digging it out.
I was going to RTFA but it's densely packed in an unfriendly typeface and when I opened it up, I immediately saw warning signs of conspiracy-mongering (Hey, this guy publishes an "investigative newsletter" called Microwave News! And he has a doctorate in environmental policy from MIT! That means if he says that the science is 100% solid about cell phones causing harm, he must be right, because God knows no one who got a doctorate at MIT ever got convinced of some cockamamie theory and started "investigative newsletters" to pursue some non-existent threat!) and research fail ("The "hearing," however, didn't happen via normal sound waves perceived through the ear. It occurred somewhere in the brain itself, as EM waves interacted with the brain's cells, which generate tiny electrical fields." First of all, any time someone mentions the Frey effect, 80% of the time you're about to hear schizophrenic ranting about government mind control transmissions. Second of all, the author seems to have made up the theory that the Frey effect happens because of EM waves interacting with brain cells; it seems quite inconsistent with Frey's own findings that there were some individuals who could not hear sounds around the frequency of 5Kc who also could not hear the "rf sounds". If the Frey effect bypassed the ear and directly stimulated the brain, why would anyone who had a brain be unable to detect this stimulus? Why would the people who were unable to detect this stimulus also be those with known deficiencies in their ears? Coincidence?)
Anyways, I suspected that what I would find in the article was a situation similar to the Myung meta-review of cell-phone/cancer studies, where the author declared that even though the overall review of the chosen studies had failed to establish any sort of convincing evidence that cell phones caused cancer, a "sub-group" of "high-quality" studies established a "significant positive association". What the meta-review may have failed to call attention to, however, was that seven out of the eight "high-quality" studies were all done by the same researchers, a group led by Dr. Lennart Hardell, and that Hardell is frequently retained as an expert witness in lawsuits against cell-phone companies. I wouldn't be surprised if at least 75% of the "independently funded" studies in the GQ article are also by researchers who profit handsomely from testifying in similar lawsuits. People talk about how they can't trust any studies done by "industry", but they're naive to think that litigation itself is not an industry.
By the same logic I should get all my information on nuclear power plants from the National Enquirer, because when was the last time you heard of nuclear power companies buying advertising in the Enquirer?
Well, you could try wiggling out of this one on a technicality, insisting on an article that is provably wrong in key facts and has been for more than a week, rather than one where that exact situation occurred but the article was later corrected after more than a week. But I'm sure you wouldn't do that, since that would be an artificial limitation.
So perhaps you should look at this version of an article about Colin Pitchfork, a convicted child killer: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colin_Pitchfork&oldid=141669223 . Among the other false key facts presented in the article for twenty-five days (over three weeks):
* the city and the county where the murders occurred;
* the years where they occurred;
* the existence of a third murder;
* the year of Pitchfork's confession;
* the date and year of Pitchfork's sentencing;
* the name of the initial incorrect suspect;
* the affiliation of the scientist who developed the technique that identified Pitchfork;
* how Pitchfork's ruse to defeat forensic testing failed.
That's a bit more than "spelling errors and questionable references."
I have actually dreamed in Wikipedia's two-column version-diff format.
Of course, of course. They mean "Deletionist" in the exact same way that those fulminating about "those power-hungry deletionists" mean "deletionist". Sure.
And the hip-hop group "Niggaz With Attitudes" -- they mean "nigger" when they say it, exactly the same way that the Ku Klux Klan means "nigger" when they say it. Sure.
You know, in all the time I've spent at Wikipedia, I've yet to see even one instance of this fabulous mythical beast, the "deletionist", whose identifying characteristic is that he wants things deleted for the sake of deletion.
Have I heard reports of deletionists at work? Why, of course I have! But like the reports of Bigfoot or the Mothman or the Jersey Devil, they never quite pan out. The "deletionist" is a vicious, self-important dictator, who wants to wipe out someone's hard work just to prove his own power. What always seems to be found at the site where the "deletionist" was supposedly sighted was an editor who thought the article was a hoax (frequently because none of Wikipedia's rules about PROVIDE YOUR DAMN SOURCES were paid attention to) or an editor who thinks the subject has failed to demonstrate encyclopedic notability (your favorite restaurant may be a great place, but Wikipedia can't afford to give an article to every single "great place" in the world; what makes this one merit an article?) or who had some other concern about the article.
In short, when editors suggest that an article should be deleted, they usually have article-specific reasons for thinking it should be deleted. Sometimes those reasons are wrong; I've seen those reasons be VERY wrong. But this stereotype of "the deletionist" is a straw man and the most frequent use of it I've seen has been by people who didn't know what they were actually doing on Wikipedia, trying to blame those who did know what they were doing for their failure to get their way.
So, logically, the solution would be to distort the name of the band so that their name-brand does not increase as a result of the media buzz, right? Shame on you for pulling this stunt, BookBerry!
The rate of accuracy of the system can never exceed that of the humans involved in the process. If a human technician calls a non-match a match or a match a non-match 1 in 200 times (and though I can't remember where I read it, I've read that that's the actual figure obtained by reviewed the records of DNA techs) then the chance that two DNA samples would be said to match each other if they were not actually from the same donor are not "1 in 668 jillion" but ... 1 in 200.
That's a load of garbage. The topic of "belief systems that have led good people to do evil things" does not begin and end with religion. Or do you think that the only people who supported the regime of Nazi Germany were those who subscribed to the religion that the Nazi Party tried to cobble together? Do you actually expect us to believe that out of all the millions of people who in some small way made willing contributions to the evils of the Third Reich, not one of them was an atheist?
Hear, hear. The Freezoners tend to be pretty decent people. Most of them got into Scientology because they actually believed Scientology's promise about how "our goal is a world without war, crime and insanity." And most of them get out because they catch on that the Church of Scientology isn't living up to those lofty goals. Those who still practice the belief system after they get out of the organization generally do so in a general moral, socially positive way, trying to keep true to "Hubbard's ideals". So what if the evidence shows that L. Ron Hubbard himself didn't live up to "Hubbard's ideals"? It wouldn't be the first time that someone trying to live up to a role model did far better than the role model actually did.
Whether it was "by proxy" is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that you misrepresented it.
If you make an entire post whose whole point is "Hey, if you look really carefully, you'll see that the Foundation used some slippery wording to make it sound like they denied Merkey's allegations, but they didn't actually deny Merkey's allegations!" and it turns out that the 'slippery wording' is entirely in your imagination and your entire analysis is based on your failure to look 'really carefully', then I don't see why you should get any attention when you follow up your blatantly non-factual misrepresentations with ad hominem arguments attempting to push the same ideas.
That's changing the subject. Explaining why you do not believe the Wikimedia Foundation's statement does not answer the question of why you misrepresented the Wikimedia Foundation's statement.
This post corrects the falsehood of the parent, pointing out that in fact the statement did quite definitely deny the allegations against Wales.
Why is the post making the false claim rated more highly than the post telling the truth? Anyone can look at the statement of the Wikimedia Foundation and see that MSTCrow5429's interpretation of it is entirely false.
Mind citing a source on that? If Spitzer was even suspected of any financial dishonesty, it would be an even bigger news story than his involvement with prostitution. But typing "Spitzer" and "embezzle" into Google News gets exactly one result, and that result does not contain any allegations of embezzlement.
I think you may have done your news reading too hastily.
Calling this claim "the most damning [against Wales] yet," as the SMH does, ignores the fact that it is coming from a thoroughly untrustworthy source.
Mission: Impossible. 3rd season episode "The Play", IIRC.
When it's such a poor parody that a reasonable person might be led to believe untrue things on its basis. If it wasn't so, then we would have, effectively, no laws against defamation; I could simply print on my blog "Daniel Lyons, also known as 'Fake Steve Jobs', was arrested today on charges of sexual deviancy and corruption of minors as he attempted to flee to Mexico" and then when the lawsuits came my way I could just simply blink innocently and say "Why ... didn't you understand that was parody?? Surely it's not my fault if the majority of people who read what I wrote did not see any reason to think I was telling other than the truth!"
Back when it was possible -- just barely -- for an intelligent person to think SCO might still have a case that they were just coincidentally showing no proof of, Dan Lyons was among those trying to portray SCO as in all likelihood a bunch of swell guys who had produced something of value, only to see it ripped off, and were now simply seeking just compensation for having been ripped off.
That in itself is proof of nothing except excessive credulity.
What makes Lyons a two-faced mealymouth is that in the same time period he wrote the infamous "Linux's Hit Men" article, in which he excoriated the Free Software Foundation for seeking compensation/compliance in cases where swell programmers had produced something of value and put it under the GPL only to see the fruits of their labors ripped off. The Foundation, Lyons tells the reader, "doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house, or at the very least share it with cloners ... maybe, as some suggest, the foundation wants GPL-covered code to creep into commercial products so it can use GPL to force open those products." Lyons' final line? "Such a pity, comrade."
So, let's sum up. When it's a commercial company which claims it has been ripped off (even if it's actively refusing to show anyone its evidence of the alleged ripoff under reasonable conditions) Lyons thinks it's perfectly okay for them to demand huge financial recompense. When it's open source coders that get ripped off, however, Lyons thinks it's pretty jerky for anyone to actually make the rippers-off comply with the license for the code they chose to use -- if not some sort of sinister conspiracy.
Gee, I can't think why anyone would doubt the sincerity of Lyons' love for Linux and open source.