They aren't required to wear veils. But outside of the richer areas if they don't they are harassed and often physically assaulted. Vigilante enforcement is still enforcement.
The NSF isn't just the military. Leftists, Nasrists, Socialists, Communists, Christians, Liberals. That's a broad anti-Islamist coalition. It doesn't represent the rural poor at all, but for the rest of the country even if the Islamists had 0 power the NSF has factions they can respect.
I'm tired of "don't be naive" as an excuse for conspiracy theories that have no support in evidence. If we ruled Egypt they would have a liberal secular democracy and a large free trade zone with Israel. They would have been strongly in support of the invasion of Iraq and sent troops as part of the "coalition of the willing". We give money to the Egyptian Army and have some influence over them, that's about it.
Obama didn't throw Mubarak under the bus. He didn't stop the military from replacing him. Same with Morsi. His foreign policy is to mostly leave the government of Egypt to Egyptians. In much the same way as Mubarak wasn't inconsistent when first the American people elected a Republican with Reagan then a Democrat with Clinton then a Republican again with Bush then a Democrat again with Obama.
The money is a horrible problem in American politics. But the point of the money is advertising to change people's opinions. Better funded candidates can and do lose all the time. Money has a marginal influence on political success.
America has bad politicians mostly because it has a bad electorate.
The fair and free elections were democratic. The lack of checks and balances that allowed a democracy to be subverted into majoritarianism wasn't democratic.
You do realize that Bill Clinton initiated several wars that killed thousands of innocent Serbs - to deflect attention from his peccadillos
No I don't realize that. I do realize that Bill Clinton along with other western powers had to respond to Serbia which was bullying and having wars with Croat and Muslims during the breakup of Yugoslavia. And after the Serbs were repeatedly told their broader territorial claims were rejected and they continued a policy of ethnic cleansing he responded quite aggressively.
Syria and Lebanon. In the case of Syria they are keeping in place a government whom the people despise. A classic invasion. In the case of Lebanon they've created an army operating on Lebanese soil not answerable to the government or the society.
If anything military was the cause the defeats in the east led to the Renaissance. The waste and destruction of the crusades probably pushed back the renaissance.
Nah. Bring back the Romans. Under the Pharaohs Egypt was a cruel slave state with terrible poverty. Roman Egypt was a center of learning and enlightenment. The economy thrived. The people were happy. It was a glorious, glorious period.
What's so bad about that? The military is well respected and broad in its support for and by the Egyptian people. They are technocratic. They have a good and responsible policy. They are used to compromise.
I'm hard pressed to see how the military isn't a positive influence on the NSF.
This isn't that unusual of a situation where you have cities and rural areas disagreeing on social policy. Social polices are local determined at the county level. What is legal in the cities is illegal in the rural areas. Enforcement is handled locally. There is a strong division of power. Problem solved.
What does this have to do with Israel? Why would you even bring them up? Maybe Finland wants a military dictatorship. I here Thailand is backing a return to monarchy. Niger is pushing for the states to dissolve and Federalism to emerge.
What's happening in Egypt is about Egypt. Israel has nothing to do with it. And if Israel wants anything they want a government that is more friendly and has legitimacy. A government with lots of Copts. A government that is openly pro-USA.... They have reason to want a military dictatorship that has to fuel their legitimacy by feeding anti-Semetic nonsense like bring Israel up in situations where it has no involvement.
The election was rather narrow. It is entirely possible that a few percentage points of the population has shifted to the coalition government. Which means the NSF: leftists, Nasrists, socialists, communists, Christians, liberals has the majority to govern.
When both choices are unacceptable, the only logical choice is to not vote.
No when both choices are unaccepted the logical choice is to carefully balance and find the lesser of evils. If I have two candidates that on a scale from 1-10 are a 2 and 3 respectively, I'd rather have the 3 than the 2. That doesn't mean I like the 3.
I'd love to see someone step in and force our president and congress to be more democratic. I think Obama is a really great president. I don't think we need a coup and no one has asked for one. That being said if the military came and and put an end an end to corporate oligarchy, secret laws, secret interpretations of the law, the security state, the unwillingness to work effectually with congress (horse trade)... I could see it being rather popular.
Having a military that allows the people to control things only to the extent that the military likes what is going on is a poor substitute for rule of law.
Morsi didn't like the rule of law either. He undermined the court system because it came from the old regime. More importantly there is no rule of law if 45-48% hates the laws.
He was narrowly democratically elected and ruled like a dictator. Egypt lacked checks and balances which protected minority interests. I'd say he was a majoritarian not a democrat.
It was a direct result on the ~2006-2010 "lolwikipedia so unreliable" what was getting heard more and more (notice how you rarely hear this anymore), for better and for worse.
At the time there was competition from mainstream encyclopedias. In particular and last to go was Britanica. Britanica had a large number of excellent articles written by experts. Wikipedia beat them when they were unreliable: 20x the size, free, better web interface, more up to data. People valued that more than accuracy.
But I would agree that this push is often what drove the deletionist victory. This was their argument and it did win the day. But it also devastated the community.
Getting back a 'real' wiki with all its pros and cons where Wikipedia (which will then be a 'fake' wiki; it will run wiki software, but not a wiki philosopy) can cherry pick from isn't so bad. Maybe this could even be its own project. I'm not sure yet. As long as that wiki/namespace is not scared of being called unreliable and won't think they have to respond to that they'll be fine.
I think having the more reliable project takes the pressure off. Larry Sanger was right about that. On the other hand once the "wiki" gets to be 20x or so the size of the "authoritative" site then the pressures will repeat. People will start switching their primary encyclopedia over to the new site because a few million articles doesn't compare to a few hundred million articles. Wikipedia will become Britannica and the new site will get the attention. For example, having a good quality article on every restaurant in the United States along with their menu, their reviews, their delivery policy... is going to get used a lot. And that's going to carry over when it comes to articles on more authoritative topics where wikipedia can be too short.
The nice though is these articles create a starting point. The way the free britanica, Catholic encyclopedia, free mathematical encyclopedia.... did for early wikipedia in the early days. But wikipedia is going to have to decide if they can move articles over from the new "liberal encyclopedia". The current crop of admins would treat it like a blog and not allow content to move over.
Let's take an example. There are several good books that came from the translation of the records of the consistory under John Calvin that speak to the history of how low developed in early protestantism. Essentially when the philosophy of law shifted between Protestant and Catholic Europe. This is an important article and there are good quality sources. There is nothing on wikipedia on this. Now there is good reason for them not having a long article. Any sort of statistical analysis of those records is "original research" and any detailed conversation isn't encyclopedic. Wikipedia typically in these sorts of situations wants to wait for more academic research for a long article. And that's reasonable in keeping with NOR. But I think there is enough well references summary material for a 2000 word article even today. I think most wikipedians would want that kind of article. Now normally I'd write it because I think the encyclopedia needs a good article on the consistory and the changes in the philosophy of law between Protestant and Catholic Europe. So assume I write this article for the freer encyclopedia, what happens?
Spam might still be a problem. I'm not sure how big of a problem.
Spam was tasteful in the old days. Generally the attitude was conflict of interest is bad, not having an article is worse. Obvious bad spam got deleted. Biased articles that conformed to wikipedia except for Neutral Point of View got revised. And BTW I have articles where I've had obvious spammers For example one of my articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_programming_language had serious spam problems and there I couldn't get much help regarding posters with obvious commercial interests.
Anyway. Today the attitude has shifted and wikipedia would rather not have an article than have one with COI.
When I look over the history of the Bristol Palin article, I see a prod, which was removed by the very next editor (not you), and an AfD [wikipedia.org] which, well, saying one had to fight ones way to keep it is not really the reality of that discussion
You are looking too late. The discussion was getting the article off 6 months of semi-protection and getting the right to create it and.... I'm glad after having to put up with all that nonsense the AN/I was a non event. The article was on my userspace during that early time so there wasn't going to be an AN/I.
This is the important part. I think the Wikimodel is an amazing model at creating content to solidly mediocre to pretty decent levels. To a very good level, not so much. Maintaining a very good level, even much less so.
Well that wasn't wikipedia's goal. Wikipedia was supposed to be an almost infinite collection of so/so article. Nupedia was supposed to be the collection of awesome articles. http://en.citizendium.org/ could play that role. Wikipedia even today isn't great content and can't be because of the "no original research" strictly applied combined with anonymous editors. Good encyclopedias have a few true experts write great articles with a professional editing team. Wikipedia changed the world by writing about the 10m topics for which there weren't true experts.
The threshold for joining the community has almost certainly risen. We're working on it though, and to attempt to steer back to the original topic, making at least one hindrance easier to overcome - the arcane editing interface.
I agree fully that's a good thing. A person's wikipedia interaction starts with them making minor changes to articles correcting a fact here or adding a reference. The next phase though is usually an overhaul or creation of an article and that's where they are likely to get turned away. My first article was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_OpenLinux . It never would have written under today's rules.
A bad article was more and more seen as a problem, rather than as a start for something great.
Exactly! People don't even use redlinks anymore to indicate "you should put an article here". The idea was that all articles started as stubs and grew.
so much better is it now for its readers.
I don't know about that. If wikipedia had kept on growing it could have something like 200m articles and hundreds of thousands of editors. I'd love to be able to get a good or even so-so quality article on every piece of networking equipment. Get a good or even so-so quality article on every command in every programming language. Get a good or even so-so quality article on every major building in the world. How are the almost 200m articles better for me?
How we can get the energy and spunk of the earlier years back, while maintaining the relevance and overall higher quality of the more recent years is the great challenge Wikipedia currently faces.
You can't. The more wikipedia requires great quality the more it becomes a job and not a hobby. People get paid to do work. In the case of wikipedia after 2007 the payoff has been for many people being able to be cruel and crush other people. By 2010 there was no group of newbies left in large enough numbers. So suddenly the community wasn't big enough.
Slashdot Mirror
They aren't required to wear veils. But outside of the richer areas if they don't they are harassed and often physically assaulted. Vigilante enforcement is still enforcement.
The NSF isn't just the military. Leftists, Nasrists, Socialists, Communists, Christians, Liberals. That's a broad anti-Islamist coalition. It doesn't represent the rural poor at all, but for the rest of the country even if the Islamists had 0 power the NSF has factions they can respect.
I'm tired of "don't be naive" as an excuse for conspiracy theories that have no support in evidence. If we ruled Egypt they would have a liberal secular democracy and a large free trade zone with Israel. They would have been strongly in support of the invasion of Iraq and sent troops as part of the "coalition of the willing". We give money to the Egyptian Army and have some influence over them, that's about it.
Obama didn't throw Mubarak under the bus. He didn't stop the military from replacing him. Same with Morsi. His foreign policy is to mostly leave the government of Egypt to Egyptians. In much the same way as Mubarak wasn't inconsistent when first the American people elected a Republican with Reagan then a Democrat with Clinton then a Republican again with Bush then a Democrat again with Obama.
The money is a horrible problem in American politics. But the point of the money is advertising to change people's opinions. Better funded candidates can and do lose all the time. Money has a marginal influence on political success.
America has bad politicians mostly because it has a bad electorate.
The fair and free elections were democratic. The lack of checks and balances that allowed a democracy to be subverted into majoritarianism wasn't democratic.
No I don't realize that. I do realize that Bill Clinton along with other western powers had to respond to Serbia which was bullying and having wars with Croat and Muslims during the breakup of Yugoslavia. And after the Serbs were repeatedly told their broader territorial claims were rejected and they continued a policy of ethnic cleansing he responded quite aggressively.
Syria and Lebanon. In the case of Syria they are keeping in place a government whom the people despise. A classic invasion. In the case of Lebanon they've created an army operating on Lebanese soil not answerable to the government or the society.
Our system has checks. 34 states to force a convention and 38 states to do anything.
If anything military was the cause the defeats in the east led to the Renaissance. The waste and destruction of the crusades probably pushed back the renaissance.
Hitler -- paganism
Stalin -- atheism
Mao -- Eastern philosophy
Gengis Khan -- Buddhist / Taoist
Attila the Hun -- Arian
Nah. Bring back the Romans. Under the Pharaohs Egypt was a cruel slave state with terrible poverty. Roman Egypt was a center of learning and enlightenment. The economy thrived. The people were happy. It was a glorious, glorious period.
What's so bad about that? The military is well respected and broad in its support for and by the Egyptian people. They are technocratic. They have a good and responsible policy. They are used to compromise.
I'm hard pressed to see how the military isn't a positive influence on the NSF.
This isn't that unusual of a situation where you have cities and rural areas disagreeing on social policy. Social polices are local determined at the county level. What is legal in the cities is illegal in the rural areas. Enforcement is handled locally. There is a strong division of power. Problem solved.
What does this have to do with Israel? Why would you even bring them up? Maybe Finland wants a military dictatorship. I here Thailand is backing a return to monarchy. Niger is pushing for the states to dissolve and Federalism to emerge.
What's happening in Egypt is about Egypt. Israel has nothing to do with it. And if Israel wants anything they want a government that is more friendly and has legitimacy. A government with lots of Copts. A government that is openly pro-USA.... They have reason to want a military dictatorship that has to fuel their legitimacy by feeding anti-Semetic nonsense like bring Israel up in situations where it has no involvement.
The election was rather narrow. It is entirely possible that a few percentage points of the population has shifted to the coalition government. Which means the NSF: leftists, Nasrists, socialists, communists, Christians, liberals has the majority to govern.
No when both choices are unaccepted the logical choice is to carefully balance and find the lesser of evils. If I have two candidates that on a scale from 1-10 are a 2 and 3 respectively, I'd rather have the 3 than the 2. That doesn't mean I like the 3.
I'd love to see someone step in and force our president and congress to be more democratic. I think Obama is a really great president. I don't think we need a coup and no one has asked for one. That being said if the military came and and put an end an end to corporate oligarchy, secret laws, secret interpretations of the law, the security state, the unwillingness to work effectually with congress (horse trade)... I could see it being rather popular.
Morsi didn't like the rule of law either. He undermined the court system because it came from the old regime. More importantly there is no rule of law if 45-48% hates the laws.
He was narrowly democratically elected and ruled like a dictator. Egypt lacked checks and balances which protected minority interests. I'd say he was a majoritarian not a democrat.
At the time there was competition from mainstream encyclopedias. In particular and last to go was Britanica. Britanica had a large number of excellent articles written by experts. Wikipedia beat them when they were unreliable: 20x the size, free, better web interface, more up to data. People valued that more than accuracy.
But I would agree that this push is often what drove the deletionist victory. This was their argument and it did win the day. But it also devastated the community.
I think having the more reliable project takes the pressure off. Larry Sanger was right about that. On the other hand once the "wiki" gets to be 20x or so the size of the "authoritative" site then the pressures will repeat. People will start switching their primary encyclopedia over to the new site because a few million articles doesn't compare to a few hundred million articles. Wikipedia will become Britannica and the new site will get the attention. For example, having a good quality article on every restaurant in the United States along with their menu, their reviews, their delivery policy... is going to get used a lot. And that's going to carry over when it comes to articles on more authoritative topics where wikipedia can be too short.
The nice though is these articles create a starting point. The way the free britanica, Catholic encyclopedia, free mathematical encyclopedia.... did for early wikipedia in the early days. But wikipedia is going to have to decide if they can move articles over from the new "liberal encyclopedia". The current crop of admins would treat it like a blog and not allow content to move over.
Let's take an example. There are several good books that came from the translation of the records of the consistory under John Calvin that speak to the history of how low developed in early protestantism. Essentially when the philosophy of law shifted between Protestant and Catholic Europe. This is an important article and there are good quality sources. There is nothing on wikipedia on this. Now there is good reason for them not having a long article. Any sort of statistical analysis of those records is "original research" and any detailed conversation isn't encyclopedic. Wikipedia typically in these sorts of situations wants to wait for more academic research for a long article. And that's reasonable in keeping with NOR. But I think there is enough well references summary material for a 2000 word article even today. I think most wikipedians would want that kind of article. Now normally I'd write it because I think the encyclopedia needs a good article on the consistory and the changes in the philosophy of law between Protestant and Catholic Europe. So assume I write this article for the freer encyclopedia, what happens?
Spam was tasteful in the old days. Generally the attitude was conflict of interest is bad, not having an article is worse. Obvious bad spam got deleted. Biased articles that conformed to wikipedia except for Neutral Point of View got revised. And BTW I have articles where I've had obvious spammers For example one of my articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_programming_language had serious spam problems and there I couldn't get much help regarding posters with obvious commercial interests.
Anyway. Today the attitude has shifted and wikipedia would rather not have an article than have one with COI.
The SOCs include CPU, GPU and RAM. The CPU is ARM.
Didn't realize 5 degrees. What about in a cave?
You are looking too late. The discussion was getting the article off 6 months of semi-protection and getting the right to create it and.... I'm glad after having to put up with all that nonsense the AN/I was a non event. The article was on my userspace during that early time so there wasn't going to be an AN/I.
Well that wasn't wikipedia's goal. Wikipedia was supposed to be an almost infinite collection of so/so article. Nupedia was supposed to be the collection of awesome articles. http://en.citizendium.org/ could play that role. Wikipedia even today isn't great content and can't be because of the "no original research" strictly applied combined with anonymous editors. Good encyclopedias have a few true experts write great articles with a professional editing team. Wikipedia changed the world by writing about the 10m topics for which there weren't true experts.
I agree fully that's a good thing. A person's wikipedia interaction starts with them making minor changes to articles correcting a fact here or adding a reference. The next phase though is usually an overhaul or creation of an article and that's where they are likely to get turned away. My first article was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_OpenLinux . It never would have written under today's rules.
Exactly! People don't even use redlinks anymore to indicate "you should put an article here". The idea was that all articles started as stubs and grew.
I don't know about that. If wikipedia had kept on growing it could have something like 200m articles and hundreds of thousands of editors. I'd love to be able to get a good or even so-so quality article on every piece of networking equipment. Get a good or even so-so quality article on every command in every programming language. Get a good or even so-so quality article on every major building in the world. How are the almost 200m articles better for me?
You can't. The more wikipedia requires great quality the more it becomes a job and not a hobby. People get paid to do work. In the case of wikipedia after 2007 the payoff has been for many people being able to be cruel and crush other people. By 2010 there was no group of newbies left in large enough numbers. So suddenly the community wasn't big enough.
Microfiche lasts about 5x as long as paper and is 98x more efficient space wise. It can be read with a magnifying glass and a light source.
That's going to be hard to beat.