Yes. The scary thing about Wikipedia is that once you understand the process, and then start looking into what constitutes a "reliable source," you start realising how bad the other "reliable references" actually are.
The answer, of course, is: there is no substitute for thinking while reading, and nothing is safe to spoonfeed from.
To be fair, the Schools Wikipedia will be gaining popularity from being a Wikipedia distro, whereas Citizendium is a separate project. One that's proceeding quite well and methodically. Despite some personality clashes, Wikipedia and CZ are fundamentally on the same side: to make good, free educational content available to the world. Everyone wins.
This is actually much closer to the intended idea of Wikipedia - that it would be raw material for others to use. Rather than wikipedia.org itself being horribly, expensively popular as people access the live working rough draft and then complain that CVS HEAD contains bugs. Oh well. You get the userbase you get, not the userbase you first thought of.
MAN ON FIVE, Cook County, Monday -- The McCain campaign is looking at an Electoral College strategy heading into the final two weeks that has virtually no room for error.
"Democrat voting fraud is famous since Tammany Hall," says Republican strategist Karl Rove. "So we'll win without votes."
Voting machines have been remotely reset and the counts adjusted. "Diebold have come to the party big time." Touch screen machines for West Virginia early voting offer voters "McCAIN" or "REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN LATER."
The rolls will be thoroughly checked for voter fraud. "If the typeface or font size is different on their driver's licence, Social Security or the voter roll, that's obvious blatant fraud. A typical Liberal knife to the heart of democracy."
The party will check for dead voters as well. "We're making the safe assumption that all registered Democrats are dead. If they're not, we'll correct that." Governor Palin has long dealt with Democrat moose in Alaska. "You betcha!"
All residents of properties whose mortgages were underwritten by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac will be assumed to have voted Republican. "We own the houses, of course we own the votes. It's nonsense to say otherwise."
Finally, under USA-PATRIOT, Obama supporters will be deemed associates of associates of terrorists. The offence will carry a penalty of one day's imprisonment: November 4th.
Mr Rove is confident in the future of our democracy. "One man, one vote. That man being me."
"The economic crisis will ultimately eliminate Andrew Keen projects and the 'Web 2.0 BS economy,'" says Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Pundit. Along with the economic downturn and record job loss, he says, we will see the elimination of projects including the Register, the Inquirer, Seth Finkelstein, and much of the punditsphere. Instead of pundits offering their services "for money," he says, we're about to see a "sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of their labour" and a rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with clues. Companies that will survive, he says, include Slashdot, Wikipedia and XNXX. "The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue selling away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some 'back end' revenue," says Keen.
They just don't understand that it's not a zero-sum economy, and others' freedom of enterprise with their enterprising efforts is good not only for everyone else, but for them.
Without the pirates, would they have known to sell Windows for $3 in China? Of course not!
Well, yeah. There is no deterministic solution to editorial quality. This sort of debate is for the sort of obsessive nerd with induced aspergism who insists the world be in black and white because they personally are no good at handling shades of grey. You know, Wikipedia editors.
That's precisely the origin of the Wikipedia phrase "truth, not verifiability" - apparently nonsensical, but "truth" is unattainable, whereas "verifiability" is humanly manageable.
REDMOND, Indian Ocean, Monday - Microsoft has announced that today is "Global Anti-Piracy Day," with the aim to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation caused by robbery and murder on the high seas.
"Robbery, rape and brutal murder on the high seas is just like people copying that floppy," sobbed billionaire Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "You wouldn't steal a patented software process, why would you steal a cargo ship?"
Piracy off the coast of Somalia has made these the most dangerous waters for software development in the world. The pirates use hacked zombie PCs, sometimes impounding codebases and programming staff at the point of their Heckler & Koch MP3s and demanding warez before they are released.
A famous attack late last year against one luxury system was foiled when the crew scared the pirates off with the Righteous Mathematical Stentor, an ear-splitting acoustic device developed in Massachusetts as a "non-lethal" free software advocacy weapon.
Somali clan leaders have agreed to end over two decades of Unix wars in the country and have made attempts to address the piracy problem. But the tremendous lawlessness off the long eastern Somali coastline reflects the difficulty of controlling the flow of information on the Internet.
In one breakthrough, pirate chiefs have resolved that they will never pirate Windows Vista or Office 2007. "Not even with your dick."
The catch with Office 2007 and Vista is that the latest is not in fact the greatest. With Microsoft making XP hard to get and Office 2003 impossible to get, Piracy® is yet again The Better Choice(tm).
Consider the economic benefits of spam! MessageLabs reports that Egham, Surrey, on the suburban outskirts of London, is the town that receives the most spam in Britain.
"It's not like there's much else to do," says Boris Busybody, 77 (IQ), of Egham Hythe, idly whirling his four-foot penis around his head in a desultory fashion. "Expanding your manhood, growing your breasts, increasing your sperm... the Lib Dem phone calls get a bit much. That's Doctor Busybody, by the way. My Ph.D arrived last week."
Spam has revitalised the local economy. Busybody has given up cab driving and is now working a lucrative job processing payments from home after he sent them his bank details in response to an urgent security message. "I had that King Otumfuo Opoku Ware II in the back of my cab once. Very generous and helpful fellow."
The Egham Tourist Board has seized the day, with plans for a 50 foot tall penis sculpture at Junction 13 of the M25 on the exit ramp to the town. The sculpture will be encircled by a genuine imitation Rolex and spray a fountain of Spermamax, obtained at a very reasonable rate from a Canadian pharmacy. "You will search an hour for your underwear in the ocean of our spam!" is to become the new town motto.
"I did get a good one the other day," says Busybody. "Barrister Matthew Sergeant Busybody of MessageLabs said we could promote our town to millions of people just by sending them an advance fee to process our incoming email. The stuff they try! â(TM)Scuse me, V!k@grk@ kicking in, got to go have sex again. Sorry."
YOUR DESK, Your office (Work) -- The chances of you finishing writing this article without getting interrupted or distracted are slim.
U.S. office workers get interrupted on the job as often as eleven times per hour, costing as much as $588 billion in paid time lost to open content production each year. The digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run smoothly -- cc'ed email jokes, Internet porn and chatting up that hottie in the next office by IM -- are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks like writing Uncyclopedia or Wikipedia accomplished.
The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. These take up 2.1 hours of the average day -- 28 percent -- with workers taking an average of five minutes to recover from each interruption and return to their original gag-writing or witty picture editing, or querulous talk page arguments and arbitration cases about the correct format for subheadings on articles about disused former US highways. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.
From online shopping at work to planning the office holiday party, workers are bombarded with distractions. "It's certainly a recipe for even less writing getting done," said a typically bone-idle and parasitical Uncyclopedia timewaster. "It's 'There's my BlackBerry. What time is it in Kittenhoeffer right now? How many phone calls did I get? Can I win the sales office spider solitaire competition?' It's a lot of productive timewasting turned to useless 'productivity.' People like the convenience and possibilities that this technology affords them when they want to use it, but that doesn't increase the average quality of Wikipedia or pump up the funneh on Uncyc!"
Still another study found a group of workers interrupted by e-mail and telephones scored lower on an IQ test than a test group that had smoked marijuana. Unfortunately, EPA regulations still forbid bong hits at one's desk, even when trying to fix one's makefile.
There is a mini rebellion under way, however. Desperate for some quiet time to think, people are coming up with low-tech strategies to get away from all their technology. "If you don't have that sort of free time to dream and muse and mull, then you are not being creative, by definition. I find hiding in the server room with my laptop is a good place to work on witty tales of Britney Spears flashing her lunch at paparazzi."
The problem appears to be getting worse. A study by Wikia earlier this year found that 62 percent of British Uncyclopedians are addicted to their e-mail -- checking messages during meetings, after working hours and on vacation, hoping to get their funny take onto UnNews first.
"If I wanted to work," said the user, "hell. I'd get a job."
Slashdot Mirror
Parker Peters is a long-running troll (commonly known as Enviroknot or ElKabong) and has never been a Wikipedia admin in any shape or form.
Yes. The scary thing about Wikipedia is that once you understand the process, and then start looking into what constitutes a "reliable source," you start realising how bad the other "reliable references" actually are.
The answer, of course, is: there is no substitute for thinking while reading, and nothing is safe to spoonfeed from.
To be fair, the Schools Wikipedia will be gaining popularity from being a Wikipedia distro, whereas Citizendium is a separate project. One that's proceeding quite well and methodically. Despite some personality clashes, Wikipedia and CZ are fundamentally on the same side: to make good, free educational content available to the world. Everyone wins.
This is actually much closer to the intended idea of Wikipedia - that it would be raw material for others to use. Rather than wikipedia.org itself being horribly, expensively popular as people access the live working rough draft and then complain that CVS HEAD contains bugs. Oh well. You get the userbase you get, not the userbase you first thought of.
Torrents are apparently being set up, should be in place by 23rd according to Andrew Cates from SOS.
Just for you: [citation needed] in popular culture.
Just after I submitted this, Andrew Cates from SOS Children's Villages corrected the hits on the site - it was actually 14,000 a day, not 6,000!
Also, Rove eats kittens. Big juicy fluffy ones.
MAN ON FIVE, Cook County, Monday -- The McCain campaign is looking at an Electoral College strategy heading into the final two weeks that has virtually no room for error.
"Democrat voting fraud is famous since Tammany Hall," says Republican strategist Karl Rove. "So we'll win without votes."
Voting machines have been remotely reset and the counts adjusted. "Diebold have come to the party big time." Touch screen machines for West Virginia early voting offer voters "McCAIN" or "REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN LATER."
The rolls will be thoroughly checked for voter fraud. "If the typeface or font size is different on their driver's licence, Social Security or the voter roll, that's obvious blatant fraud. A typical Liberal knife to the heart of democracy."
The party will check for dead voters as well. "We're making the safe assumption that all registered Democrats are dead. If they're not, we'll correct that." Governor Palin has long dealt with Democrat moose in Alaska. "You betcha!"
All residents of properties whose mortgages were underwritten by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac will be assumed to have voted Republican. "We own the houses, of course we own the votes. It's nonsense to say otherwise."
Finally, under USA-PATRIOT, Obama supporters will be deemed associates of associates of terrorists. The offence will carry a penalty of one day's imprisonment: November 4th.
Mr Rove is confident in the future of our democracy. "One man, one vote. That man being me."
"The economic crisis will ultimately eliminate Andrew Keen projects and the 'Web 2.0 BS economy,'" says Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Pundit. Along with the economic downturn and record job loss, he says, we will see the elimination of projects including the Register, the Inquirer, Seth Finkelstein, and much of the punditsphere. Instead of pundits offering their services "for money," he says, we're about to see a "sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of their labour" and a rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with clues. Companies that will survive, he says, include Slashdot, Wikipedia and XNXX. "The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue selling away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some 'back end' revenue," says Keen.
WORKSFORME on K-Unbuntu Leengux 8.10. What shell you using?
Obviously, Microsoft is anti-free enterprise today.
They just don't understand that it's not a zero-sum economy, and others' freedom of enterprise with their enterprising efforts is good not only for everyone else, but for them.
Without the pirates, would they have known to sell Windows for $3 in China? Of course not!
Well, yeah. There is no deterministic solution to editorial quality. This sort of debate is for the sort of obsessive nerd with induced aspergism who insists the world be in black and white because they personally are no good at handling shades of grey. You know, Wikipedia editors.
I'm counting observed malware in the wild. Hundreds of thousands for Windows, nothing for Mac or Linux. Why is that?
Nah, they just hire Linux weenies. Kids are cheap. And it's not like there aren't a zillion of them.
You are of course quite correct, please excuse my brainfart. Verifiability, not truth! "Truth not verifiability" is the motto of Conservapedia.
*applause*
That's precisely the origin of the Wikipedia phrase "truth, not verifiability" - apparently nonsensical, but "truth" is unattainable, whereas "verifiability" is humanly manageable.
Real programmers type cat | cc and get it right the first time.
REDMOND, Indian Ocean, Monday - Microsoft has announced that today is "Global Anti-Piracy Day," with the aim to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation caused by robbery and murder on the high seas.
"Robbery, rape and brutal murder on the high seas is just like people copying that floppy," sobbed billionaire Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "You wouldn't steal a patented software process, why would you steal a cargo ship?"
Piracy off the coast of Somalia has made these the most dangerous waters for software development in the world. The pirates use hacked zombie PCs, sometimes impounding codebases and programming staff at the point of their Heckler & Koch MP3s and demanding warez before they are released.
A famous attack late last year against one luxury system was foiled when the crew scared the pirates off with the Righteous Mathematical Stentor, an ear-splitting acoustic device developed in Massachusetts as a "non-lethal" free software advocacy weapon.
Somali clan leaders have agreed to end over two decades of Unix wars in the country and have made attempts to address the piracy problem. But the tremendous lawlessness off the long eastern Somali coastline reflects the difficulty of controlling the flow of information on the Internet.
In one breakthrough, pirate chiefs have resolved that they will never pirate Windows Vista or Office 2007. "Not even with your dick."
The catch with Office 2007 and Vista is that the latest is not in fact the greatest. With Microsoft making XP hard to get and Office 2003 impossible to get, Piracy® is yet again The Better Choice(tm).
"It's the Child-Rapist-Murderer Anti-Defamation League on line two. They say you compared them to spammers. I think you'll need to apologise."
Oh, no we don't. Because Unix is actually more secure than Windows.
Consider the economic benefits of spam! MessageLabs reports that Egham, Surrey, on the suburban outskirts of London, is the town that receives the most spam in Britain.
"It's not like there's much else to do," says Boris Busybody, 77 (IQ), of Egham Hythe, idly whirling his four-foot penis around his head in a desultory fashion. "Expanding your manhood, growing your breasts, increasing your sperm ... the Lib Dem phone calls get a bit much. That's Doctor Busybody, by the way. My Ph.D arrived last week."
Spam has revitalised the local economy. Busybody has given up cab driving and is now working a lucrative job processing payments from home after he sent them his bank details in response to an urgent security message. "I had that King Otumfuo Opoku Ware II in the back of my cab once. Very generous and helpful fellow."
The Egham Tourist Board has seized the day, with plans for a 50 foot tall penis sculpture at Junction 13 of the M25 on the exit ramp to the town. The sculpture will be encircled by a genuine imitation Rolex and spray a fountain of Spermamax, obtained at a very reasonable rate from a Canadian pharmacy. "You will search an hour for your underwear in the ocean of our spam!" is to become the new town motto.
"I did get a good one the other day," says Busybody. "Barrister Matthew Sergeant Busybody of MessageLabs said we could promote our town to millions of people just by sending them an advance fee to process our incoming email. The stuff they try! â(TM)Scuse me, V!k@grk@ kicking in, got to go have sex again. Sorry."
YOUR DESK, Your office (Work) -- The chances of you finishing writing this article without getting interrupted or distracted are slim.
U.S. office workers get interrupted on the job as often as eleven times per hour, costing as much as $588 billion in paid time lost to open content production each year. The digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run smoothly -- cc'ed email jokes, Internet porn and chatting up that hottie in the next office by IM -- are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks like writing Uncyclopedia or Wikipedia accomplished.
The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. These take up 2.1 hours of the average day -- 28 percent -- with workers taking an average of five minutes to recover from each interruption and return to their original gag-writing or witty picture editing, or querulous talk page arguments and arbitration cases about the correct format for subheadings on articles about disused former US highways. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.
From online shopping at work to planning the office holiday party, workers are bombarded with distractions. "It's certainly a recipe for even less writing getting done," said a typically bone-idle and parasitical Uncyclopedia timewaster. "It's 'There's my BlackBerry. What time is it in Kittenhoeffer right now? How many phone calls did I get? Can I win the sales office spider solitaire competition?' It's a lot of productive timewasting turned to useless 'productivity.' People like the convenience and possibilities that this technology affords them when they want to use it, but that doesn't increase the average quality of Wikipedia or pump up the funneh on Uncyc!"
Still another study found a group of workers interrupted by e-mail and telephones scored lower on an IQ test than a test group that had smoked marijuana. Unfortunately, EPA regulations still forbid bong hits at one's desk, even when trying to fix one's makefile.
There is a mini rebellion under way, however. Desperate for some quiet time to think, people are coming up with low-tech strategies to get away from all their technology. "If you don't have that sort of free time to dream and muse and mull, then you are not being creative, by definition. I find hiding in the server room with my laptop is a good place to work on witty tales of Britney Spears flashing her lunch at paparazzi."
The problem appears to be getting worse. A study by Wikia earlier this year found that 62 percent of British Uncyclopedians are addicted to their e-mail -- checking messages during meetings, after working hours and on vacation, hoping to get their funny take onto UnNews first.
"If I wanted to work," said the user, "hell. I'd get a job."
(original link)