The study that showed that in WP's strongest field (the sciences), it still had 30% more mistakes than a real encyclopaedia and that some of these were both major and basic? That's an endorsement alright!
Compare the budgets available to WP vs the Britannica and you'll see that WP has done pretty well considering the resources they have to work with.
The code is fantastic, the content is worthless
I've found the content to be useful on a number of occasions, as have many other people. If WP doesn't work for you, fine -- ask for your money back and use something else.
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields.
Interesting -- that was, in fact, the original way the project worked, back when it was called Nupedia. The Nupedia project never made it to 100 articles before folding due to lack of interest. Hence the move to the more inclusive and successful Wikipedia format.
If I build a nice house for myself at the center of the Earth, will it have zero-gravity? If so, will it feel the same as being in orbit would (since the gravity of the mass on each side of me would cancel out the gravity on the other side), or would it feel different -- like being the rope at the center of a game of tug-o-war?
The demand for a portable mp3 player was negligible also, until Apple stepped up and did it right. Then demand skyrocketed.
When someone makes an e-book that can display any HTML or PDF document with comparable quality to paper, has reasonable size and battery life, and isn't too expensive, demand for e-books will skyrocket as well. Given that they could potentially replace books, the eventual market for e-book devices will probably dwarf that of mp3 players.
Ah, a human-powered vehicle, with a food-powered human, running on food that was grown and transported using lots of gasoline... so I'm not sure you're entirely in the clear there.;^)
You're wrapping an insult with layers of platitudes. At the core you are still saying that the fault lies with the user.
Yes, and that is because the fault does lie with the user. Anyone who uses a tool inappropriately has only themselves to blame if it doesn't do what they want. In this case, the people who are expecting to use the Wikipedia as if it were authoritative misunderstood what it was.
They aren't doing it for fun, they are doing it because it gives their genes an advantage
"fun" and "gives genes an advantage" aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I would argue that what a given organism considers "fun" is an direct result of what is genetically advantageous for that organism. (hence the popularity of sex, no doubt...;^))
Take a look at abortion, in the Roe vs. Wade case. That was called "progress".
Mainly because it was progress. The problem is that women are going to have abortions whether abortion is legal, or not. What we as a society have control over is whether those abortions will be safe and legal, or whether they will be performed in secret by amateurs, and commonly result in the severe injury or death of the woman. It's analogous to repealing Prohibition -- which we did not because we approve of alcohol particularly, but because the effects of banning it turned out to outweigh than the benefits.
I think many people in the USA are too young to remember what life was like in the USA before abortions were legal. Those people should take a look at what is going on in South America, whose countries have some of the world's strictest anti-abortion laws, and paradoxically also some of the world's highest rates of abortion. In many of those countries there are mass movements to legalize abortion, for the same reasons we legalized it here.
Abortion is an unpleasant thing, and well-meaning people on both sides of the issue should want to see the number of abortions minimized. The way to do that, however, is to educate people about their bodies and contraception, so that they have control over when and how they get pregnant, and thus no need for abortion. Simply banning abortion only drives it underground.
. Once you say something is "right", nobody will be able to tell future generations that it's "wrong".
That's clearly not true: past generations thought slavery and racial discrimination was "right", but the abolition and civil rights movements were able to convince society that they were "wrong". So it is possible to de-legitimize practices that are widely seen as unethical.
Can you bear with the responsibility of not drawing the line one millimeter further than it should be? Can you?
Yes, because I'm aware that erring too far on the side of caution can be just as harmful as plunging ahead to quickly. For example: if we ban all stem-cell research, we risk condemning millions of nerve-disease suffers to an early, painful death that they could otherwise have been saved from. (or, a more extreme/ludicrous but nonetheless factual example: girls in Islamic schools dying in fires because the (male) firefighters were not allowed to enter the building to rescue them. Here the cost of upholding the girls' "morality" cost them their lives)
If there's a problem - well, the user must be stupid!
A less inflammatory way to put it would be:
If the problem is that the user doesn't understand how the Wikipedia works, then the solution is to educate the user
People see the suffix -pedia on the end of the site and assume that it will work the same as a printed encylopedia. That's a false assumption. Whether it's the site owners or the user (or both) who are to blame for the making of that assumption isn't terribly relevant.
Wow. Good thing the Slate author didn't go into the story with an axe to grind or anything.
No axe there -- "devout Christian apologist" is an accurate description of C.S. Lewis, and one that Mr. Lewis would have happily accepted. It was Mr. Lewis' explicitly expressed desire to spread Christian beliefs through his books.
Unless you want to assert that Christianity is the only belief structure with a Death-and-Rebirth cycle, and advocating personal sacrifice for one's intended goals, I think there's nothing to hang an allegory on.
Apparently you missed the whole bit about Aslan sacrificing himself in exchange for saving the life of a sinner (Edmund)?
I guess that's one way to do it... if you can't get your computer program to think like a brain, just chop off a hunk of actual brain and wire it up to your PC as an external co-processor.
Still seems like a cop-out to me, though. Plus it means that old, discarded computers are going to start smelling a lot worse...
Wait, is/. for protecting intellectual property or against it, I'm confused!
/. is a web site. As a non-human software entity, it has no opinions of its own. You might as well ask if your toaster if "for" or "against" bagels.
If you are wondering what the people who post to/. think, you'll have to ask each of them individually, since they may each have their own different opinion.
This is published by Microsoft. I'm pretty sure they intentionally published it in their own format, without caring about the difficulties they cause people who won't use their products.
That would be the traditional Microsoftian behaviour, I agree. However, perhaps they are beginning to see the light, what with the new open Office format, etc? At least they are making noises in that direction. So it can't hurt to pressure them to do the same thing with other media. One of the reasons why the status quo remains the status quo is because not enough people protest it.
Do you think maybe you gave up the right to complain when you espoused your beliefs?
An interesting theory... do you really think anyone who has beliefs has no right to complain? (if so, you can you get the US religious right to please shut up? For a group with so much political power they sure do play the victim a lot;^))
I seriously don't mean to troll - you've voluntarily handicapped yourself. Now you get to live with it.
That's one way to look at it -- another way is that by publishing the videos in a closed format, the publishers unintentionally made it difficult for people to view their content. It's their right to do that, of course... but perhaps they don't realize the problems they are causing for their (potential) audience, in which case a little complaining might be just the thing to get them to switch to a more useful format.
If nobody complains, the situation will never improve, no?
It's no the "high traffic" part that causes the problem, it's the "recent" part. i.e. if the page is being Slashdotted, that means that it's likely in a very dynamic/volatile state, and so when you view the page, there may be errors introduced into the page (e.g. within the last 5 seconds) that nobody has had time to correct yet.
After the page has had time to settle down, the extra eyeballs will (on average) have improved it. But if the page is still in the process of being edited fifty different ways by fifty different people, then it's not surprising that it may be inconsistent/incorrect. Hence the warning message.
Yeah, and then you end up paying hundreds of pounds more than you had to. Well done Einstein!
You may have noticed from the article that the perpetrator got caught -- something that will happen to almost everyone who habitually engages in criminal behaviour, sooner or later. In this case, the whole escapade will probably end up costing the guy thousands of pounds over the course of his life time, because his reputation is ruined and he will have a much harder time getting a decent job. So he's actually going to pay "thousands of pounds more than he would have had to", all for an iPod that he doesn't even get to keep. I think Einstein could have figured that out in advance.
Why is it that naive, idealistic comments get modded up, but harsh realistic comments get modded down?
Stupid comments get modded down. Being "harsh" and (allegedly) "realistic" does not guarantee that a comment is not also stupid.
"I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!"
Exactly how much voltage were they applying to his testicles when he wrote that statement?
It's no different for the AI. It is born with whatever desires we choose to program into it, and has to live with that.
I suppose the AI (or us) could figure out how to re-program its desire-set so it (we) wanted different things... that reminds me of a Lewis Carroll anecdote:
girl: I'm so glad I don't like broccoli!
friend: why?
girl: Because if I liked it, I would eat it every day, and I simply can't stand it!
It will quickly be intelligent enough to contribute to the design of it's next generation and start rapidly accelerating Moore's law [...] In ten years time, the world will be changed in ways truly beyond our imagination because the intelligence making the change will be beyond our comprehension
Perhaps, but you are assuming several things about the AIs... (1) that they want to make themselves more intelligent (2) that they want to change the world, and (3) that they have access to the physical resources to do either. All of those are true of (some) human beings, but may or may not be true for the AIs.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you provide some links or something to back this up? It sounds like a clear violation of the First Amendment to me.
Compare the budgets available to WP vs the Britannica and you'll see that WP has done pretty well considering the resources they have to work with.
The code is fantastic, the content is worthless
I've found the content to be useful on a number of occasions, as have many other people. If WP doesn't work for you, fine -- ask for your money back and use something else.
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields.
Interesting -- that was, in fact, the original way the project worked, back when it was called Nupedia. The Nupedia project never made it to 100 articles before folding due to lack of interest. Hence the move to the more inclusive and successful Wikipedia format.
Executive summary: The Wikipedia hive-mind rejected his article and he's bitter about it.
Before our dirty secret gets out!
Cthulu?
Just curious....
The demand for a portable mp3 player was negligible also, until Apple stepped up and did it right. Then demand skyrocketed.
When someone makes an e-book that can display any HTML or PDF document with comparable quality to paper, has reasonable size and battery life, and isn't too expensive, demand for e-books will skyrocket as well. Given that they could potentially replace books, the eventual market for e-book devices will probably dwarf that of mp3 players.
I think you would find that the fuel and infrastructure costs for transporting all that waste so far away would be prohibitively large.
Ah, a human-powered vehicle, with a food-powered human, running on food that was grown and transported using lots of gasoline... so I'm not sure you're entirely in the clear there.
Yes, and that is because the fault does lie with the user. Anyone who uses a tool inappropriately has only themselves to blame if it doesn't do what they want. In this case, the people who are expecting to use the Wikipedia as if it were authoritative misunderstood what it was.
And there's still been no mention of poor Algernon. Shame, people!!!
"fun" and "gives genes an advantage" aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I would argue that what a given organism considers "fun" is an direct result of what is genetically advantageous for that organism. (hence the popularity of sex, no doubt...
Mainly because it was progress. The problem is that women are going to have abortions whether abortion is legal, or not. What we as a society have control over is whether those abortions will be safe and legal, or whether they will be performed in secret by amateurs, and commonly result in the severe injury or death of the woman. It's analogous to repealing Prohibition -- which we did not because we approve of alcohol particularly, but because the effects of banning it turned out to outweigh than the benefits.
I think many people in the USA are too young to remember what life was like in the USA before abortions were legal. Those people should take a look at what is going on in South America, whose countries have some of the world's strictest anti-abortion laws, and paradoxically also some of the world's highest rates of abortion. In many of those countries there are mass movements to legalize abortion, for the same reasons we legalized it here.
Abortion is an unpleasant thing, and well-meaning people on both sides of the issue should want to see the number of abortions minimized. The way to do that, however, is to educate people about their bodies and contraception, so that they have control over when and how they get pregnant, and thus no need for abortion. Simply banning abortion only drives it underground.
. Once you say something is "right", nobody will be able to tell future generations that it's "wrong".
That's clearly not true: past generations thought slavery and racial discrimination was "right", but the abolition and civil rights movements were able to convince society that they were "wrong". So it is possible to de-legitimize practices that are widely seen as unethical.
Can you bear with the responsibility of not drawing the line one millimeter further than it should be? Can you?
Yes, because I'm aware that erring too far on the side of caution can be just as harmful as plunging ahead to quickly. For example: if we ban all stem-cell research, we risk condemning millions of nerve-disease suffers to an early, painful death that they could otherwise have been saved from. (or, a more extreme/ludicrous but nonetheless factual example: girls in Islamic schools dying in fires because the (male) firefighters were not allowed to enter the building to rescue them. Here the cost of upholding the girls' "morality" cost them their lives)
That a two-party system is not adequate to meet our needs?
A less inflammatory way to put it would be:
If the problem is that the user doesn't understand how the Wikipedia works, then the solution is to educate the user
People see the suffix -pedia on the end of the site and assume that it will work the same as a printed encylopedia. That's a false assumption. Whether it's the site owners or the user (or both) who are to blame for the making of that assumption isn't terribly relevant.
Wow. Good thing the Slate author didn't go into the story with an axe to grind or anything.
No axe there -- "devout Christian apologist" is an accurate description of C.S. Lewis, and one that Mr. Lewis would have happily accepted. It was Mr. Lewis' explicitly expressed desire to spread Christian beliefs through his books.
Unless you want to assert that Christianity is the only belief structure with a Death-and-Rebirth cycle, and advocating personal sacrifice for one's intended goals, I think there's nothing to hang an allegory on.
Apparently you missed the whole bit about Aslan sacrificing himself in exchange for saving the life of a sinner (Edmund)?
Still seems like a cop-out to me, though. Plus it means that old, discarded computers are going to start smelling a lot worse...
If you are wondering what the people who post to
That would be the traditional Microsoftian behaviour, I agree. However, perhaps they are beginning to see the light, what with the new open Office format, etc? At least they are making noises in that direction. So it can't hurt to pressure them to do the same thing with other media. One of the reasons why the status quo remains the status quo is because not enough people protest it.
An interesting theory... do you really think anyone who has beliefs has no right to complain? (if so, you can you get the US religious right to please shut up? For a group with so much political power they sure do play the victim a lot
I seriously don't mean to troll - you've voluntarily handicapped yourself. Now you get to live with it.
That's one way to look at it -- another way is that by publishing the videos in a closed format, the publishers unintentionally made it difficult for people to view their content. It's their right to do that, of course... but perhaps they don't realize the problems they are causing for their (potential) audience, in which case a little complaining might be just the thing to get them to switch to a more useful format.
If nobody complains, the situation will never improve, no?
After the page has had time to settle down, the extra eyeballs will (on average) have improved it. But if the page is still in the process of being edited fifty different ways by fifty different people, then it's not surprising that it may be inconsistent/incorrect. Hence the warning message.
You may have noticed from the article that the perpetrator got caught -- something that will happen to almost everyone who habitually engages in criminal behaviour, sooner or later. In this case, the whole escapade will probably end up costing the guy thousands of pounds over the course of his life time, because his reputation is ruined and he will have a much harder time getting a decent job. So he's actually going to pay "thousands of pounds more than he would have had to", all for an iPod that he doesn't even get to keep. I think Einstein could have figured that out in advance.
Why is it that naive, idealistic comments get modded up, but harsh realistic comments get modded down?
Stupid comments get modded down. Being "harsh" and (allegedly) "realistic" does not guarantee that a comment is not also stupid.
once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement
for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm
only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this
not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it.
Please! Please! Please!"
Exactly how much voltage were they applying to his testicles when he wrote that statement?
I suppose the AI (or us) could figure out how to re-program its desire-set so it (we) wanted different things... that reminds me of a Lewis Carroll anecdote:
girl: I'm so glad I don't like broccoli!
friend: why?
girl: Because if I liked it, I would eat it every day, and I simply can't stand it!
and start rapidly accelerating Moore's law [...] In ten years time, the world will be
changed in ways truly beyond our imagination because the intelligence making the change will be beyond our comprehension
Perhaps, but you are assuming several things about the AIs... (1) that they want to make themselves more intelligent (2) that they want to change the world, and (3) that they have access to the physical resources to do either. All of those are true of (some) human beings, but may or may not be true for the AIs.