The rules change and become fluid, so it becomes hard to know if you follow them or not.
The beauty of Wikipedia is: it's easy to ignore all rules. Don't bother wading through hundreds of pages of arcane bureaucratic rule cruft. Instead, when you are about to make an edit, simply ask yourself "Do I truly want to make the encyclopedia better, or do I want to push a certain agenda or piss someone off?" Answer this one question honestly, and then you'll know whether your edit is ok or not.
for the system to create higher complexity out of thin air is completely bunk to me
Have you ever looked into genetic algorithms and genetic programming? There you see the creation of "higher complexity out of thin air" before your very eyes.
Who, what and where is this I in ID that they speak of?
The I in ID was a design committee. Buddha, Brahma and Allah got together, had a brainstorming session, agreed on specifications, and promptly went on to design bacterial flagella.
The problem is that evolution cannot be demonstrated making simple stuff into complex stuff before the eyes of observers and cameras.
Teach genetic algorithms and genetic programming in school. Then everybody will believe that simple stuff can turn into useful complex stuff if you throw in some randomness, wait long enough, and always weed out the useless stuff. You can try it at home.
One is to declare evolution is flat out wrong without argument. Another is to point out evolution's flaws (something evolutionists get very testy about, btw. They don't like their faith questioned anymore than religious people do) Still another is to concede some evolution occurred and suggest that God guided evolution.
And here's another possibility: believe that God created a wonderful universe with laws rich enough to lead to the eventual evolution of sentient life. He looked at it, saw that it was good, and decided that no further tinkering was necessary.
However, the likelihood that God is intimately concerned with our lives is a question completely independent of science, and cannot be considered to have been demonstrated to be more or less likely, no matter what science discovers.
Well, if there's a personal God intimately concerned with our lives, then the fact that he caused or at least did not prevent the tsunami shows that his priorities are extremely strange indeed. He then certainly cannot be described as "good" in any of the word's standard senses.
It is not uncommon that a cable company refuses to carry a show they don't agree with, thereby executing absolute veto power. Jimbo has never executed censorship to a comparable degree. Your position, namely that any content should be rejected if it could in principle be controlled by an entity that is (or, in the case of Jimbo, was) connected to the distribution of hard-core (or, in the case of Jimbo, soft-core) porn, is untenable.
Do they have experience in subjects that require strict compliance with standards? Or is their access to publishing tools a result of catering to prurient desires?
I'm sure you don't intend to imply that this is an "either-or", right? Obviously authors with experience in their subject matter sometimes gain access to publishing tools that were partly financed by someone else's catering to prurient desires. (Notwithstanding the fact that we of course both agree that there's nothing wrong with catering to "prurient desires" (I just love the phrase).)
Would you let your kid watch PBS, even though the cable tv connection is provided by AT&T and therefore partially financed by the hard core porn they distribute?
And to answer your question: I would indeed not hire Hugh Hefner to tutor sociology, nor would I hire Bill Gates or Stephen Hawkins to tutor sociology.
So have the DRMs for HD-DVD and Blu-ray already been cracked? Without that, the systems are clearly dead in the water. Nobody will switch from DVDs if they cannot continue to copy their favority movies.
The one-sentence summary of your 500+ word essay is this: a resource that can be edited by anyone at any time is not necessarily accurate or even-handed. You will agree that this insight of yours is not a particularly deep one. In fact, I hope that it is completely obvious to every reader of Wikipedia.
How about this for an insight: an information source can be quite useful even if it is not completely accurate and even-handed. Think for instance of your senses, or your memory.
The Germans force Google to censor Nazi and body modification sites; the Americans forbid Tracy Lords pornography and censor librarians who want to talk about FBI investigations; the Chinese censor discussions of Falun Gong and Taiwan independence. Everybody censors what they are afraid of. Nothing to see here. It's all good.
Well, I tried this approach many years ago to deal with usenet and email spam: The Blacklist of Internet Advertisers. Painfully obvious to all of us, it was a spectacular failure.
Admittedly, the benefits and arguments in favor of slavery, witch burning, cannibalism, censorship, female circumcision and human sacrifice are somewhat underrepresented in Wikipedia, because the proponents cannot or do not participate.
Rather I think you are saying that atomic clocks (i.e. atomic vibrations) are affected by relativistic frames of reference, and not that time actually passes more slowly.
Yes, that would be one way to interpret the atomic-clock observation. But the trouble is that it isn't just atomic clocks or atomic vibrations. Everything goes slower. Your heartbeat. A pendulum clock. The timespan that a fly lives. Everything. So the best explanation is to say that time itself is slowed down in that frame compared to ours.
Anyone can verify it at any time, but nobody has to.
How many wiki authors are willing to submit all this biodata and identity proofs?
I don't know.
Do the unapproved edits get auto-added in 5 days?
Of course not. Presumably they're unapproved for a reason. The anonymous author can of course always try to alert an editor of the edit's merits.
I don't want my real name exposed
Why not? You're just assembling verifiable information from other sources, right? What's the danger in admitting that you were the one who did that? Also, we already expose your IP address, so anyone can hack into your computer and find your real name anyway.
Can wikipedia guarantee the security of all the personal info people submit?
What's there to guarantee? The information will be plainly visible to all.
will "elitize"
I didn't say you have to have a Ph.D. All you have to have is a name.
Obviously, every editor can provide their own procedure of verification. Verification then consists of carrying out this procedure.
Possible methods would be "Call the information desk of Metropolitan State University, have them connect you to Axel Boldt; the guy who picks up the phone is me. If you say 'quick' I'll answer 'quack'." or "Come on over to 1572 Portland Av. #5, Saint Paul, MN and I'll buy you a beer and show you my driver's license."
where it can be both correct, and incorrect, depending on when you access it.
If you want to learn about a controversial topic in Wikipedia, you obviously need to read the article in conjunction with its history and its discussion page. If you do that, you'll get a very well rounded view of the controversy, including the positions, arguments, biases and lies of the involved parties. No ordinary encyclopedia (or newspaper, or peer-reviewed article) comes even close in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people disagree.
The beauty of Wikipedia is: it's easy to ignore all rules. Don't bother wading through hundreds of pages of arcane bureaucratic rule cruft. Instead, when you are about to make an edit, simply ask yourself "Do I truly want to make the encyclopedia better, or do I want to push a certain agenda or piss someone off?" Answer this one question honestly, and then you'll know whether your edit is ok or not.
The "basic" in "basic research" doesn't mean "simple" or "elementary". It means "fundamental", as in "the basis that underlies everything".
Not true.
Have you ever looked into genetic algorithms and genetic programming? There you see the creation of "higher complexity out of thin air" before your very eyes.
The I in ID was a design committee. Buddha, Brahma and Allah got together, had a brainstorming session, agreed on specifications, and promptly went on to design bacterial flagella.
Take an afternoon to look into genetic algorithms and genetic programming. Then you'll understand the principle.
Teach genetic algorithms and genetic programming in school. Then everybody will believe that simple stuff can turn into useful complex stuff if you throw in some randomness, wait long enough, and always weed out the useless stuff. You can try it at home.
And here's another possibility: believe that God created a wonderful universe with laws rich enough to lead to the eventual evolution of sentient life. He looked at it, saw that it was good, and decided that no further tinkering was necessary.
Well, if there's a personal God intimately concerned with our lives, then the fact that he caused or at least did not prevent the tsunami shows that his priorities are extremely strange indeed. He then certainly cannot be described as "good" in any of the word's standard senses.
Get a Wikipedia account, put the articles you fix on your watchlist, then check your watchlist every couple of months.
It is not uncommon that a cable company refuses to carry a show they don't agree with, thereby executing absolute veto power. Jimbo has never executed censorship to a comparable degree. Your position, namely that any content should be rejected if it could in principle be controlled by an entity that is (or, in the case of Jimbo, was) connected to the distribution of hard-core (or, in the case of Jimbo, soft-core) porn, is untenable.
Do they have experience in subjects that require strict compliance with standards? Or is their access to publishing tools a result of catering to prurient desires?
I'm sure you don't intend to imply that this is an "either-or", right? Obviously authors with experience in their subject matter sometimes gain access to publishing tools that were partly financed by someone else's catering to prurient desires. (Notwithstanding the fact that we of course both agree that there's nothing wrong with catering to "prurient desires" (I just love the phrase).)
Would you let your kid watch PBS, even though the cable tv connection is provided by AT&T and therefore partially financed by the hard core porn they distribute?
And to answer your question: I would indeed not hire Hugh Hefner to tutor sociology, nor would I hire Bill Gates or Stephen Hawkins to tutor sociology.
That sounds almost as if you think soft porn might somehow be a bad thing.
So have the DRMs for HD-DVD and Blu-ray already been cracked? Without that, the systems are clearly dead in the water. Nobody will switch from DVDs if they cannot continue to copy their favority movies.
How about this for an insight: an information source can be quite useful even if it is not completely accurate and even-handed. Think for instance of your senses, or your memory.
The Germans force Google to censor Nazi and body modification sites; the Americans forbid Tracy Lords pornography and censor librarians who want to talk about FBI investigations; the Chinese censor discussions of Falun Gong and Taiwan independence. Everybody censors what they are afraid of. Nothing to see here. It's all good.
Well, I tried this approach many years ago to deal with usenet and email spam: The Blacklist of Internet Advertisers. Painfully obvious to all of us, it was a spectacular failure.
Admittedly, the benefits and arguments in favor of slavery, witch burning, cannibalism, censorship, female circumcision and human sacrifice are somewhat underrepresented in Wikipedia, because the proponents cannot or do not participate.
Yes, that would be one way to interpret the atomic-clock observation. But the trouble is that it isn't just atomic clocks or atomic vibrations. Everything goes slower. Your heartbeat. A pendulum clock. The timespan that a fly lives. Everything. So the best explanation is to say that time itself is slowed down in that frame compared to ours.
Well, if you're a male, then the whole point of your existence is to fuck. Why do you think there are two sexes?
We have
Anyone can verify it at any time, but nobody has to.
How many wiki authors are willing to submit all this biodata and identity proofs?
I don't know.
Do the unapproved edits get auto-added in 5 days?
Of course not. Presumably they're unapproved for a reason. The anonymous author can of course always try to alert an editor of the edit's merits.
I don't want my real name exposed
Why not? You're just assembling verifiable information from other sources, right? What's the danger in admitting that you were the one who did that? Also, we already expose your IP address, so anyone can hack into your computer and find your real name anyway.
Can wikipedia guarantee the security of all the personal info people submit?
What's there to guarantee? The information will be plainly visible to all.
will "elitize"
I didn't say you have to have a Ph.D. All you have to have is a name.
Obviously, every editor can provide their own procedure of verification. Verification then consists of carrying out this procedure.
Possible methods would be "Call the information desk of Metropolitan State University, have them connect you to Axel Boldt; the guy who picks up the phone is me. If you say 'quick' I'll answer 'quack'." or "Come on over to 1572 Portland Av. #5, Saint Paul, MN and I'll buy you a beer and show you my driver's license."
If you want to learn about a controversial topic in Wikipedia, you obviously need to read the article in conjunction with its history and its discussion page. If you do that, you'll get a very well rounded view of the controversy, including the positions, arguments, biases and lies of the involved parties. No ordinary encyclopedia (or newspaper, or peer-reviewed article) comes even close in this regard.