wikipedia != The final source for information Can it be useful, yes. Is it the final word, no.
Of course, and the people who run wikipedia clearly agree with you. It's an online encyclopedia, after all. This is why so many pages have a list of at the bottom pointing to other sites. Encyclopedias have always been for introductions to and summaries of a topic, not for in-depth information.
I have seen too many wikipedia pages that were wrong.
A couple of analyses of this have been published. The general conclusion is that wikipedia has an error rate comparable to commercial encyclopedias. No surprise there. So don't trust them (or any other site). Go check some of the others.
(i.e. a fish one was about the average size. Wiki page said 2-4 pounds when the minimum size keeper is 6-8 pounds)
So where's the conflict? It's quite possible for the mean size of a species to be below the minimum "keeper" size, especially under pressure from commercial fishing. There are some species of fish in which the age of first reproduction has been falling, because fishing pressure has eliminated almost all of the older, larger fish that used to control the spawning sites. The younger ones now have to do the reproducing, because they probably won't survive into true adulthood. This has happened with mammals, too, notably with African elephants, with poachers killing most of the older adults for their tusks. This is a serious problem for a highly social species.
Of course, it's quite possible for an encyclopedia article to have such numbers from different sources, and any of them might be wrong.
OTOH, the studies comparing wikipedia with printed encyclopedias have said that wikipedia's numbers tend to be somewhat better. This is probably partly because they've been updated more recently. It's also because a lot of technical articles are written by experts in the topic, and they have access to all the right numbers. But typos are always possible, and wikipedia really doesn't have professional editors to find and fix them.
I've gotten a couple of dubious numbers fixed by inserting a parenthesized comment pointing out that several interrelated numbers in the page were mutually inconsistent, so at least one of them must be wrong. This was usually followed quickly by one or more numbers changing (and my comment disappearing). You can't do this with a printed publication.
Some people have written whole books without the letter E. We can get rid of all those words, too!
Yeah; things like that can be fun, if a bit silly.
A similar thing that some people have done is to eliminate (from both speech and writing) any form of the word "be". This is interesting because when you do it the usual effect is to make your language more precise. I've known a number of people who do this in their writing, usually not dogmatically, and say that it's almost always an improvement. To start with, it eliminates the passive voice. Passive has its uses, of course, but the extreme over-use in much management writing is familiar to all of us.
I once wrote a rather long post on this in another forum, without using any form of "be". I didn't bother in the above paragraph, though. I'll leave that as an excercise for the reader. If you try it, you'll see both the difficulties and the benefits.
If you want a real challenge, pick two or more such restrictions, and try to apply them all to a document of your choice.
Give editing Wikipedia a shot and see the shitstorm it can raise.
Hmmm... Maybe I'm missing something. I've made a few thousand contributions to wikipedia (and wiktionary), set a "watch" on most of them, and very rarely have I ever seen an edit. There's certainly never been anything I'd call a "shitstorm". The edits I've seen to my stuff have almost always been additions that I approve of. Sometimes I've thought they were "too much information" for what is, after all, just an encyclopedia article, not an in-depth primary reference. But I've never objected to those.
Of course, my stuff has pretty much been "just the facts", and I haven't bothered getting into political or religious stuff. Maybe I should try that, for a change...
OTOH, wikipedia does seem to have a number of examples of reasonable treatments of controversial subjects. I like to point people to their Evolution page, especially the section on controversies. Presumably the religious folk have attacked this section (and the entire page), but when I've checked it out of curiosity, it always seems to be a fairly reasonable summary of the story.
... and if they don't say 'and don't cite wikipedia' beforehand, then they say it afterwards.
"Don't cite wikipedia" has become the mantra of choice for people who don't have any better argument. I generally take it as the modern variant of what use to be "My mind's made up; don't confuse me with facts". It means that no serious discussion will be permitted. So I just quietly close that window and go on to something more useful than trying to have a meaningful discussion with people who don't want one.
Sometimes I do reply that there's a good list of URLs at the bottom of the wikipedia article; don't bother me with further comments until you've read them. Then I go away. Sometimes I check back in a few weeks or months to see if the discussion ever went anywhere interesting; usually I'm disappointed.
"Don't cite wikipedia" has become a better discussion killer than invoking Godwin's Law. After all, we've reached the point where, when you google for something, the first hit that contains useful information is usually at wikipedia.org. And the rest of the useful google hits have already been copied to the bottom of the wikipedia article by someone. So the fastest heuristic for finding good info is to first google for the obvious keywords, then scan google's list for "wikipedia.org", then skim over that page, then follow the links at the bottom for the in-depth stuff.
Maybe we need to publicise this scheme a bit, and encourage people to work on keeping those "links at the bottom" complete and up to date. This isn't a glamorous task, but it's sure useful.
I think I'd have a lot to add to Wikipedia, but I don't. Any time I have made any contribution, substantial or minor, someone else comes around and knocks it off.
Well, I've thought that, too. But just yesterday, I had yet another case of looking for something and getting the "no page yet" page inviting me to write it. My immediate reaction was "But I'm no expert on this". And, as so often happens, after digging the info out of a number of other places, I had the second reaction "Why don't I write the page now?" I still have the info sitting in closed browser windows, so maybe I'll collect it and write the page later today.
I've found myself doing this repeatedly, generally for fairly obscure stuff. This particular one would need to be in a mixture of English and Chinese, and frankly, my Mandarin ain't all that great. But I've done it before, and even been disappointed when nobody with a Chinese-sounding name came along and revised my page.
Maybe part of the problem is that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked, as the metaphor goes, and all that's left is the more obscure stuff. And maybe another part is that, when there were only 2,000 articles, adding 10 new articles seemed like a huge contribution, but when there are 2,039,000 articles, 10 new ones seems a lot less impressive.
Or maybe it's mostly that wikipedia is basically done by people with spare time on their hand and a bunch of knowledge that isn't online. More and more, this situation only happens if you have some obscure knowledge and time to present it to the rest of the small population with similar interests.
Then, of course, you're risking the possibility that your work will be discarded as not significant. That may be the real reason for the decline. Maybe all that's left to document is the "long tail", and there's an active policy to eradicate such stuff. The problem here is that most of the world's actual knowledge lies out in that long tail.
Language couldn't possibly have evolved on it's own. It's far too complex. It must have been intelligently designed...
Oh, c'mon; just look at the English language. You call that intelligent design? The designer must have been a total idiot.
If that's not bad enough for you, take a good look at classical Greek and Latin. Nobody could call either of them an intelligent design, either. They look like they might have been created by humans, actually. By big committees of humans.
Of course, someone has made the reasonable-sounding conjecture that the entire universe was designed by some god, and that god was an idiot. If true, it would certainly explain why the universe appears to be such an ungodly mess.
>Running with Linux for over 9 years! Time you upgraded then - That RedHat 0.8 is looking a bit long in the tooth.
Maybe the machine is on a UPS and he's trying for the record in uptime.
Somewhere recently I saw a list of linux boxes that had been up for around 10 years. You'd sorta need an old release for the kernel, since it's still not easy to upgrade the kernel without a reboot.
They predict that the irregular form of "be" will persist for tens of thousands of years.
Or we could do as various other languages have done, and drop all present-tense forms of "be" completely.
In some cases, such as Russian and Hebrew, we have evidence of close relatives that had present-tense forms of "be", so we have a good idea what those words were and when they were lost. But such languages seem to do just fine without them. We could pretty easily drop "am", "is" and "are" from English, too, using verbless sentences instead, just as those languages did.
Another fun counterexample to claims that common words are persistent is "the", which is English's most common word. But definite articles exist in only about half of all human languages, and such words appear and disappear on fairly short time scales. A thousand years ago, neither Old English (Anglo-Saxon) nor Latin's descendants had definite articles; now they all do. A thousand years from now, most of their descendants could well have lost them. I've had some fun in several language-related fora by writing about this phenomenon and watching to see how long it took for people to notice that I hadn't used any (unquoted) definite articles in what I wrote. I did this, of course, to illustrate how easy it would be for English to lose its most common word. If someone can write natural-sounding English without any definite articles, it's hard to support a claim that such common words are necessary and must survive.
... just look at text messaging- Surely the written word can not take such a grievous blow without some damage spilling over into the spoken word.
Oh, I dunno. In previous decades, we had things like speedwriting, preceded by several varieties of shorthand. They all bear remarkable similarities to TM code, yet none of them had any discernible effect on the spoken (or standard written) language.
People have been trying to reform the atrocious English spelling system for ages. So far, nobody has had much success at this. And the spoken language continues to amble off in all directions, with total disregard to standard spelling. So I wouldn't worry about transient fads like this having any lasting impact.
It's like the bully at school. He's big and mean looking, and you don't know if he can kick your ass or not. You're smarter, dress better, and will go farther in life, but he still scares you. Do you really want to stand up to him and hope you can deal with him? Or do you just hand over your lunch money and hope he goes away?
But it doesn't take a lot of brains to understand that, if you just hand over your lunch money, that bully will be back tomorrow and every day after for more.
The approach I always used with bullies was to find a way to expose them to the authorities, as quickly as possible. When those authorities would ignore me, I'd expose them to each other, making it clear that their failure to protect a kid would not be a secret. It was interesting how quickly such open exposure turned people around.
It's no fun. But it seems to be the only way to deal with bullies.
Of course, if it's the authorities that are the bullies, you have little recourse. A problem here in the US is that we have a government that more and more sides with the bullies. Or they hire the bullies to do their dirty work. I sorta wonder when the rest of the world will wake up and realize that appeasement isn't going to work any better than it ever did.
... read every single patent that's been filed with your Patent Office, read every line of Linux code, and try to match them up.
Heh. This was presumably meant to be funny, but I've heard a similar suggestion from publishers on the topic of copyright infringement.
The specific case I've asked about is: Suppose I have a tune in my head, and I'd like to use it in a performance, recording, whatever? How can I tell if it's one of your copyrighted tunes? After all, I don't want to end up in court like George Harrison did, because I thought I'd written an original tune when it was actually someone else's tune that I heard years ago.
The publishers that I've posed this to have told me, with straight faces as far as I can tell via phone or email, that I should buy a copy of everything they've published and search through it all for the tune.
There is a certain, uh, lack of practicality to this. But as far as I can tell, companies and their lawyers do currently consider this a responsive answer to such questions.
In the case of copyrights, at least the material is published and (mostly) available. In the case of patents, however, this really isn't true. Here in the US, the Patent Office has for some time been accepting and approving patents that are written in a sort of legalese that is incomprehensible to engineers and programmers.
It's not possible to determine what is covered by recent patents by any method except asking a court. So the effect of current patents is to lock out anyone who doesn't have the funds for a possibly decade-long, multi-million-dollar court case. If you aren't rich enough, you shouldn't be building anything at all, because if you do, you can't avoid violating recent patents. Reading them won't help you; you have to use the courts to decide whether you're infringing, and you have to do it for millions of patents.
(I might add that the slashdot comment page I'm typing this into has a clear violation of one of Microsoft's earlier patents. The textarea widget has a scrollbar, and it's contained within a browser window that also has a scrollbar. Microsoft has obtained a patent on nested scrolling like this. It may be expired by now, though. I wonder if we could find out. I don't think I've read of MS trying to enforce this patent, though. I wonder why.;-)
your perspective will change significantly when you've been diagnosed with terminal cancer and offered an experimental treatment gleaned from this invaluable research.
Actually, probably not. When has a doctor ever told you anything at all about the origins of any medicine or treatment? Most doctors probably don't know much about such things, as it's not really relevant to treatment. Medical researchers would usually know, but they're not the ones that treat patients.
Anyway, people are pretty good about being hypocritical about such things. Most people would happily use a medical treatment for a problem, even if they knew it came from something that they had opposed years ago.
It might be interesting to read about a survey of what doctors know about the origins of drugs and other medical treatments. I'd predict that a small number of doctors would be knowledgeable on the topic, because they personally find it interesting. The majority might know about a few specific cases, but probably wouldn't know much about it in general, and would have an "I don't have time to study things that aren't job-related" attitude.
Well, maybe not. But if N businesses get together and "persuade" the lawmakers to pass a law requiring that all citizens must buy a product from one of those N businesses, the fact that it's not a monopoly might not make everyone happy with the law.
Similarly, here in Massachusetts, the state legislature recently passed a law requiring every resident to have health insurance. If you don't have health insurance, you will be fined an amount comparable to the lowest-price policy that's available.
So far, I've heard no discussion at all about whether this is legal, or what's likely to happen to prices. This does have a strong resemblance to that French law requiring that everyone buy salt from the state monopoly.
I've read of a number of similar cases in other countries, but I don't remember the details.
Is it a shitty API, or are these programmers just incompetent or ignorant of how to correctly do things?
Well, as one of those programmers, I'd say it's guaranteed that I'm incompetent and ignorant when any of my stuff runs on a proprietary system like Vista. Since the OS's inner workings are intentionally kept secret from me, there's no way that I can (legally) know for certain what any of my code can do if it calls anything from any system library.
If you want competent, knowledgeable programmers, the only place that it's logically possible to find them is on systems that are knowable by the programmers. And I mean knowable down to the very lowest level. For all the rest of us who are working on proprietary systems, we must accept the fact that the low-level parts of the system can sabotage our code at any time, and we have no defense.
So sure, call us incompetent and ignorant. Many of us will cheerfully agree. It's because you "users" insist on buying closed, proprietary systems whose innards are purposely hidden from us developers.
It's the origin of the old joke: "I must be a mushroom. They keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit." But The Market has spoken; customers want software built by programmers who aren't allowed to know the inner workings of the computer system. They must want this; they pay for it, and refuse to buy systems that are open to the programmers.
Wait - so you are telling me that is there a ministry wide ban on an encyclopedia because all of six people spent their time obsessively editing various article.
Obsessively? Just a few messages above yours, someone pointed out that if you did the math, these people were averaging about one edit every two weeks. That hardly qualifies as an obsession. It's more like "I don't have anything to do for the next few hours; how about I hop over to wikipedia and contribute a few paragraphs to something fun."
When you look at the actual amount of time wasted, the only conclusion is that everyone is blowing this story way, way out of proportion. You'd have to look long and hard to find any office environment where people waste less time than this.
Blocking wikipedia because of such a trivial waste of time is much like shooting flies with an elephant gun. The result is going to be more disastrous than the wasted time, since the administrators are blocking access to what is probably a useful resource to lots of their workers. It's likely that their workers who know how to use it are benefitting from access much more often than once every two weeks.
>Increasingly Wikipedia IS a legitimate resource for getting a first take on a subject that one is not familiar with. "
If your boss is paying you to write a proposal on something, you had better already be at least familiar with the subject. Or at least familiar enough with the general subject area to be able to find legitimate sources without its help.
Why? In all too many cases, if you're working on a proposal to be presented to management, the wikipedia articles on the topic will contain far more information that you can possibly include in your PowerPoint presentation.
Yeah, you can investigate the "legitimate sources" if you like. If you want to really understand the topic, you'll do that. But don't kid yourself. You're not doing further research to satisfy management. You're educating yourself. In the 10 minutes you're allotted, you won't have time to present any of that in-depth stuff. And you won't get any in-depth questions, either; the questions you'll get will be answerable from the wikipedia articles.
Doesn't everyone here already know all about Gimp?
Not me.
Granted, I have a couple of books about GIMP, and I've spent some time trying to learn to use it. I've also tried some of the online docs. They haven't helped much. When I work through the examples, I generally have two sorts of reactions: 1) What the hell did it do to the image? That wasn't at all what I expected, and it doesn't make much sense; and 2) How do I tell it to make the kinds of changes that I want?
Does this book work for someone who doesn't already know the jargon? Can a total newbie to image editing use it to trick GIMP into making desired changes, and not just uncontrolled damage to images?
Is this a good teaching manual for GIMP, that doesn't assume that you already know the inside jargon at the start? I can't really tell from the review, which was by a self-described "insider". NTTAWWT, but it'd be nice to know that this book won't be the waste of funds that a couple of others have been for someone who doesn't yet know how such things are supposed to work.
Ripping a CD by playing it through speakers and copying it into your brain is also stealing. It's just a matter of time before Sony, the RIAA, and others with Intellectual Property to protect are chasing down those criminals among us that rip off the starving artists by wantonly copying purchased CDs not just to their computers or their iPods, but also into their brains.
The iPod is really just an enabling device. The real crime is that final copy, which isn't authorized in writing by any license that I've ever read.
While science and religion generally are orthogonal, various religions play nicer than others. A religion that contains a way for conducting a government, such as Islam, is going to be in your nickers a lot more than a religion that preaches love and persuasion by kindness, such as Christianity.
Of course, it's a lot more complicated than that. Various historians have suggested that it was no accident that the main part of the industrial and scientific "revolution" of the past few centuries happened mainly in the Protestant parts of Europe. The Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christianity have had a long history of interfering with science, as their leaders have decided on various theological grounds that science threatens their religion.
Galileo is the poster boy for this, of course, but there are hundreds of other examples. It's not really obvious why the Catholic church's leaders would consider detailed astronomical knowledge a religious threat, since the bible really isn't an astronomy text. But they did, even going so far as to say that Jupiter's satellites couldn't exist. Such things did have a retarding effect on science in countries that gave the church political power. For whatever reason, Protestant leaders rarely considered such things of theological interest, so even where they had power, they didn't much impede scientific work. We even have examples of Protestant ministers such as Charles Darwin who contributed to science.
There are exceptions to this, of course, and Protestant suppression of knowledge is well known. Here in the US, we've seen a significant impact on some sorts of biological science since the 2000 election and the takeover of the Republican party by Christian fundamentalists. Most of the media attention has gone to the stem-cell issue. For some inexplicable reason the fundies decided that stem cells are involved in reproduction, and since anything dealing with sex must be suppressed, this research had to be stopped. They haven't been totally successful at this, but with the help of George Bush, they've managed to have a "chilling effect" that has blocked much of that research or pushed it out to other parts of the world.
More generally, Christian fundamentalists have succeeded in eliminating the teaching of evolution in American schools below the college level. This has produced a profound ignorance of basic biology in the American population (and government funding agencies).
This is fairly similar to what happened with Lysenkoism in the USSR. In that case, the Communists decided that some biological theories were in conflict with Communist doctrine, and did their best to suppress the study or teaching of such theories. Unfortunately for their science and agriculture, Lysenko was wrong, and the suppressed theories were (mostly) right. Any number of historians have pointed out that Communism (of the Marxism/Leninism sort) really was a religion, with sacred texts and prophets that must be followed blindly, so this compares directly with suppression of science by state-supported religious institutions.
In any case, the real problem is dogmatic belief systems. The main examples of these are what we call religions, but there are others that are just as bad. Since science only advances if people are allowed to examine and test current theories and discuss alternatives, any dogmas imposed by rulers will interfere with scientific advancement.
All true. But I've read a number of histories that made an interesting point about medical research: There was a limit on how far medicine could advance in a Muslim society, due to the ban on images of the human body. Past a certain point, further research (and most education) becomes very difficult unless your medical texts can contain images of (parts of) human bodies. Image processing is an important part of current medical research, and eliminating images of bodies would totally destroy most modern medical texts.
I don't suppose fields like physics or astronomy would be limited by this, though. Nor would software development (though there are some interesting disputes about the Internet in the Middle East;-).
If, as is the prevailing view on Slashdot, any curbs on entertainment are wrong, why are we supporting curbs on software use -- by, for example, cheering the GPL-enforcement litigation?
Well, one possibility is that a lot of people here would prefer weaker copyright laws for both entertainment and software. The problem, which a lot of us understand, is that under the current laws in the US and most other countries, it doesn't work to just release your software as public domain. There is a history of companies taking public software and asserting their own copyright claim over it. People have found that they don't have the legal right to use their own software, after some corporation has started selling it.
One of the functions of the GPL is to use copyright against itself, in a sense. By aggressively claiming copyright but providing an automatic free license to everyone, you stand a good chance of being able to use your own software in the indefinite future. And by requiring that "derived works" be released under the same free license, you interfere with the natural desire of corporations to fork your work and not "pay" you by sharing their improvements with you.
To those with an "information wants to be free" ideology, this is probably the best that can be done under current laws. You really have little choice but to claim your own copyright in self defense. But schemes like the GPL let you get close to the state of freedom and cooperative development that you'd like.
Currently, there's no hope that the copyright laws will be relaxed anywhere. The natural tendency of corporate bribery (I mean campaign contributions) is to make such laws more restrictive over time. About all we can really do is try to find ways to subvert such a system. We can't fix it, but maybe we can trick it into enforcing open publication and cooperative development.
One reason for cheering GPL-enforcement litigation is that the anti-FOSS folks have been arguing that the GPL can't be trusted because it has never been tested in court. Lawyers might point out that this is because they advise their clients that if you fight the GPL, you'll lose and it'll cost you. But this doesn't register with the political system, and most managers continue to insist that court tests are necessary before they'll consider using GPL'd software. So if we want GPL'd software to make inroads into business settings, having a few actual court cases to point to is probably a good idea. Depending on what the courts say, of course, and we really don't know what that will be until it happens. Courts have this way of confounding the expectations of even the expert lawyers, and how many judges have any idea what this "software" stuff is all about?
A legal dispute was settled amicably? Who'd of thunk such a thing was possible? Where were the lawyers when this was going on? Did someone take them off and get them drunk or something?
Slashdot Mirror
wikipedia != The final source for information
Can it be useful, yes. Is it the final word, no.
Of course, and the people who run wikipedia clearly agree with you. It's an online encyclopedia, after all. This is why so many pages have a list of at the bottom pointing to other sites. Encyclopedias have always been for introductions to and summaries of a topic, not for in-depth information.
I have seen too many wikipedia pages that were wrong.
A couple of analyses of this have been published. The general conclusion is that wikipedia has an error rate comparable to commercial encyclopedias. No surprise there. So don't trust them (or any other site). Go check some of the others.
(i.e. a fish one was about the average size. Wiki page said 2-4 pounds when the minimum size keeper is 6-8 pounds)
So where's the conflict? It's quite possible for the mean size of a species to be below the minimum "keeper" size, especially under pressure from commercial fishing. There are some species of fish in which the age of first reproduction has been falling, because fishing pressure has eliminated almost all of the older, larger fish that used to control the spawning sites. The younger ones now have to do the reproducing, because they probably won't survive into true adulthood. This has happened with mammals, too, notably with African elephants, with poachers killing most of the older adults for their tusks. This is a serious problem for a highly social species.
Of course, it's quite possible for an encyclopedia article to have such numbers from different sources, and any of them might be wrong.
OTOH, the studies comparing wikipedia with printed encyclopedias have said that wikipedia's numbers tend to be somewhat better. This is probably partly because they've been updated more recently. It's also because a lot of technical articles are written by experts in the topic, and they have access to all the right numbers. But typos are always possible, and wikipedia really doesn't have professional editors to find and fix them.
I've gotten a couple of dubious numbers fixed by inserting a parenthesized comment pointing out that several interrelated numbers in the page were mutually inconsistent, so at least one of them must be wrong. This was usually followed quickly by one or more numbers changing (and my comment disappearing). You can't do this with a printed publication.
Some people have written whole books without the letter E. We can get rid of all those words, too!
Yeah; things like that can be fun, if a bit silly.
A similar thing that some people have done is to eliminate (from both speech and writing) any form of the word "be". This is interesting because when you do it the usual effect is to make your language more precise. I've known a number of people who do this in their writing, usually not dogmatically, and say that it's almost always an improvement. To start with, it eliminates the passive voice. Passive has its uses, of course, but the extreme over-use in much management writing is familiar to all of us.
I once wrote a rather long post on this in another forum, without using any form of "be". I didn't bother in the above paragraph, though. I'll leave that as an excercise for the reader. If you try it, you'll see both the difficulties and the benefits.
If you want a real challenge, pick two or more such restrictions, and try to apply them all to a document of your choice.
Give editing Wikipedia a shot and see the shitstorm it can raise.
... Maybe I'm missing something. I've made a few thousand contributions to wikipedia (and wiktionary), set a "watch" on most of them, and very rarely have I ever seen an edit. There's certainly never been anything I'd call a "shitstorm". The edits I've seen to my stuff have almost always been additions that I approve of. Sometimes I've thought they were "too much information" for what is, after all, just an encyclopedia article, not an in-depth primary reference. But I've never objected to those.
...
...
Hmmm
Of course, my stuff has pretty much been "just the facts", and I haven't bothered getting into political or religious stuff. Maybe I should try that, for a change
OTOH, wikipedia does seem to have a number of examples of reasonable treatments of controversial subjects. I like to point people to their Evolution page, especially the section on controversies. Presumably the religious folk have attacked this section (and the entire page), but when I've checked it out of curiosity, it always seems to be a fairly reasonable summary of the story.
I must be missing something
... and if they don't say 'and don't cite wikipedia' beforehand, then they say it afterwards.
"Don't cite wikipedia" has become the mantra of choice for people who don't have any better argument. I generally take it as the modern variant of what use to be "My mind's made up; don't confuse me with facts". It means that no serious discussion will be permitted. So I just quietly close that window and go on to something more useful than trying to have a meaningful discussion with people who don't want one.
Sometimes I do reply that there's a good list of URLs at the bottom of the wikipedia article; don't bother me with further comments until you've read them. Then I go away. Sometimes I check back in a few weeks or months to see if the discussion ever went anywhere interesting; usually I'm disappointed.
"Don't cite wikipedia" has become a better discussion killer than invoking Godwin's Law. After all, we've reached the point where, when you google for something, the first hit that contains useful information is usually at wikipedia.org. And the rest of the useful google hits have already been copied to the bottom of the wikipedia article by someone. So the fastest heuristic for finding good info is to first google for the obvious keywords, then scan google's list for "wikipedia.org", then skim over that page, then follow the links at the bottom for the in-depth stuff.
Maybe we need to publicise this scheme a bit, and encourage people to work on keeping those "links at the bottom" complete and up to date. This isn't a glamorous task, but it's sure useful.
I think I'd have a lot to add to Wikipedia, but I don't. Any time I have made any contribution, substantial or minor, someone else comes around and knocks it off.
Well, I've thought that, too. But just yesterday, I had yet another case of looking for something and getting the "no page yet" page inviting me to write it. My immediate reaction was "But I'm no expert on this". And, as so often happens, after digging the info out of a number of other places, I had the second reaction "Why don't I write the page now?" I still have the info sitting in closed browser windows, so maybe I'll collect it and write the page later today.
I've found myself doing this repeatedly, generally for fairly obscure stuff. This particular one would need to be in a mixture of English and Chinese, and frankly, my Mandarin ain't all that great. But I've done it before, and even been disappointed when nobody with a Chinese-sounding name came along and revised my page.
Maybe part of the problem is that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked, as the metaphor goes, and all that's left is the more obscure stuff. And maybe another part is that, when there were only 2,000 articles, adding 10 new articles seemed like a huge contribution, but when there are 2,039,000 articles, 10 new ones seems a lot less impressive.
Or maybe it's mostly that wikipedia is basically done by people with spare time on their hand and a bunch of knowledge that isn't online. More and more, this situation only happens if you have some obscure knowledge and time to present it to the rest of the small population with similar interests.
Then, of course, you're risking the possibility that your work will be discarded as not significant. That may be the real reason for the decline. Maybe all that's left to document is the "long tail", and there's an active policy to eradicate such stuff. The problem here is that most of the world's actual knowledge lies out in that long tail.
Language couldn't possibly have evolved on it's own. It's far too complex. It must have been intelligently designed ...
Oh, c'mon; just look at the English language. You call that intelligent design? The designer must have been a total idiot.
If that's not bad enough for you, take a good look at classical Greek and Latin. Nobody could call either of them an intelligent design, either. They look like they might have been created by humans, actually. By big committees of humans.
Of course, someone has made the reasonable-sounding conjecture that the entire universe was designed by some god, and that god was an idiot. If true, it would certainly explain why the universe appears to be such an ungodly mess.
>Running with Linux for over 9 years!
...)
Time you upgraded then - That RedHat 0.8 is looking a bit long in the tooth.
Maybe the machine is on a UPS and he's trying for the record in uptime.
Somewhere recently I saw a list of linux boxes that had been up for around 10 years. You'd sorta need an old release for the kernel, since it's still not easy to upgrade the kernel without a reboot.
(I wonder if I could find that list
They predict that the irregular form of "be" will persist for tens of thousands of years.
Or we could do as various other languages have done, and drop all present-tense forms of "be" completely.
In some cases, such as Russian and Hebrew, we have evidence of close relatives that had present-tense forms of "be", so we have a good idea what those words were and when they were lost. But such languages seem to do just fine without them. We could pretty easily drop "am", "is" and "are" from English, too, using verbless sentences instead, just as those languages did.
Another fun counterexample to claims that common words are persistent is "the", which is English's most common word. But definite articles exist in only about half of all human languages, and such words appear and disappear on fairly short time scales. A thousand years ago, neither Old English (Anglo-Saxon) nor Latin's descendants had definite articles; now they all do. A thousand years from now, most of their descendants could well have lost them. I've had some fun in several language-related fora by writing about this phenomenon and watching to see how long it took for people to notice that I hadn't used any (unquoted) definite articles in what I wrote. I did this, of course, to illustrate how easy it would be for English to lose its most common word. If someone can write natural-sounding English without any definite articles, it's hard to support a claim that such common words are necessary and must survive.
... just look at text messaging- Surely the written word can not take such a grievous blow without some damage spilling over into the spoken word.
Oh, I dunno. In previous decades, we had things like speedwriting, preceded by several varieties of shorthand. They all bear remarkable similarities to TM code, yet none of them had any discernible effect on the spoken (or standard written) language.
People have been trying to reform the atrocious English spelling system for ages. So far, nobody has had much success at this. And the spoken language continues to amble off in all directions, with total disregard to standard spelling. So I wouldn't worry about transient fads like this having any lasting impact.
... the new language would seem to put the issue to rest.
Until next week, that is, when they silently change the TOS again.
Actually, it won't be censorship. It'll just be inexplicable packet loss. They'll be working on finding the source of the problem.
It's like the bully at school. He's big and mean looking, and you don't know if he can kick your ass or not. You're smarter, dress better, and will go farther in life, but he still scares you. Do you really want to stand up to him and hope you can deal with him? Or do you just hand over your lunch money and hope he goes away?
But it doesn't take a lot of brains to understand that, if you just hand over your lunch money, that bully will be back tomorrow and every day after for more.
The approach I always used with bullies was to find a way to expose them to the authorities, as quickly as possible. When those authorities would ignore me, I'd expose them to each other, making it clear that their failure to protect a kid would not be a secret. It was interesting how quickly such open exposure turned people around.
It's no fun. But it seems to be the only way to deal with bullies.
Of course, if it's the authorities that are the bullies, you have little recourse. A problem here in the US is that we have a government that more and more sides with the bullies. Or they hire the bullies to do their dirty work. I sorta wonder when the rest of the world will wake up and realize that appeasement isn't going to work any better than it ever did.
... read every single patent that's been filed with your Patent Office, read every line of Linux code, and try to match them up.
;-)
Heh. This was presumably meant to be funny, but I've heard a similar suggestion from publishers on the topic of copyright infringement.
The specific case I've asked about is: Suppose I have a tune in my head, and I'd like to use it in a performance, recording, whatever? How can I tell if it's one of your copyrighted tunes? After all, I don't want to end up in court like George Harrison did, because I thought I'd written an original tune when it was actually someone else's tune that I heard years ago.
The publishers that I've posed this to have told me, with straight faces as far as I can tell via phone or email, that I should buy a copy of everything they've published and search through it all for the tune.
There is a certain, uh, lack of practicality to this. But as far as I can tell, companies and their lawyers do currently consider this a responsive answer to such questions.
In the case of copyrights, at least the material is published and (mostly) available. In the case of patents, however, this really isn't true. Here in the US, the Patent Office has for some time been accepting and approving patents that are written in a sort of legalese that is incomprehensible to engineers and programmers.
It's not possible to determine what is covered by recent patents by any method except asking a court. So the effect of current patents is to lock out anyone who doesn't have the funds for a possibly decade-long, multi-million-dollar court case. If you aren't rich enough, you shouldn't be building anything at all, because if you do, you can't avoid violating recent patents. Reading them won't help you; you have to use the courts to decide whether you're infringing, and you have to do it for millions of patents.
(I might add that the slashdot comment page I'm typing this into has a clear violation of one of Microsoft's earlier patents. The textarea widget has a scrollbar, and it's contained within a browser window that also has a scrollbar. Microsoft has obtained a patent on nested scrolling like this. It may be expired by now, though. I wonder if we could find out. I don't think I've read of MS trying to enforce this patent, though. I wonder why.
your perspective will change significantly when you've been diagnosed with terminal cancer and offered an experimental treatment gleaned from this invaluable research.
Actually, probably not. When has a doctor ever told you anything at all about the origins of any medicine or treatment? Most doctors probably don't know much about such things, as it's not really relevant to treatment. Medical researchers would usually know, but they're not the ones that treat patients.
Anyway, people are pretty good about being hypocritical about such things. Most people would happily use a medical treatment for a problem, even if they knew it came from something that they had opposed years ago.
It might be interesting to read about a survey of what doctors know about the origins of drugs and other medical treatments. I'd predict that a small number of doctors would be knowledgeable on the topic, because they personally find it interesting. The majority might know about a few specific cases, but probably wouldn't know much about it in general, and would have an "I don't have time to study things that aren't job-related" attitude.
Except that there is no state monopoly.
Well, maybe not. But if N businesses get together and "persuade" the
lawmakers to pass a law requiring that all citizens must buy a product
from one of those N businesses, the fact that it's not a monopoly
might not make everyone happy with the law.
Similarly, here in Massachusetts, the state legislature recently passed a law requiring every resident to have health insurance. If you don't have health insurance, you will be fined an amount comparable to the lowest-price policy that's available.
So far, I've heard no discussion at all about whether this is legal, or what's likely to happen to prices. This does have a strong resemblance to that French law requiring that everyone buy salt from the state monopoly.
I've read of a number of similar cases in other countries, but I don't remember the details.
Is it a shitty API, or are these programmers just incompetent or ignorant of how to correctly do things?
Well, as one of those programmers, I'd say it's guaranteed that I'm incompetent and ignorant when any of my stuff runs on a proprietary system like Vista. Since the OS's inner workings are intentionally kept secret from me, there's no way that I can (legally) know for certain what any of my code can do if it calls anything from any system library.
If you want competent, knowledgeable programmers, the only place that it's logically possible to find them is on systems that are knowable by the programmers. And I mean knowable down to the very lowest level. For all the rest of us who are working on proprietary systems, we must accept the fact that the low-level parts of the system can sabotage our code at any time, and we have no defense.
So sure, call us incompetent and ignorant. Many of us will cheerfully agree. It's because you "users" insist on buying closed, proprietary systems whose innards are purposely hidden from us developers.
It's the origin of the old joke: "I must be a mushroom. They keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit." But The Market has spoken; customers want software built by programmers who aren't allowed to know the inner workings of the computer system. They must want this; they pay for it, and refuse to buy systems that are open to the programmers.
Wait - so you are telling me that is there a ministry wide ban on an encyclopedia because all of six people spent their time obsessively editing various article.
Obsessively? Just a few messages above yours, someone pointed out that if you did the math, these people were averaging about one edit every two weeks. That hardly qualifies as an obsession. It's more like "I don't have anything to do for the next few hours; how about I hop over to wikipedia and contribute a few paragraphs to something fun."
When you look at the actual amount of time wasted, the only conclusion is that everyone is blowing this story way, way out of proportion. You'd have to look long and hard to find any office environment where people waste less time than this.
Blocking wikipedia because of such a trivial waste of time is much like shooting flies with an elephant gun. The result is going to be more disastrous than the wasted time, since the administrators are blocking access to what is probably a useful resource to lots of their workers. It's likely that their workers who know how to use it are benefitting from access much more often than once every two weeks.
>Increasingly Wikipedia IS a legitimate resource for getting a first take on a subject that one is not familiar with. "
;-)
If your boss is paying you to write a proposal on something, you had better already be at least familiar with the subject. Or at least familiar enough with the general subject area to be able to find legitimate sources without its help.
Why? In all too many cases, if you're working on a proposal to be presented to management, the wikipedia articles on the topic will contain far more information that you can possibly include in your PowerPoint presentation.
Yeah, you can investigate the "legitimate sources" if you like. If you want to really understand the topic, you'll do that. But don't kid yourself. You're not doing further research to satisfy management. You're educating yourself. In the 10 minutes you're allotted, you won't have time to present any of that in-depth stuff. And you won't get any in-depth questions, either; the questions you'll get will be answerable from the wikipedia articles.
(What, me jaded and cynical? Nah!
Doesn't everyone here already know all about Gimp?
Not me.
Granted, I have a couple of books about GIMP, and I've spent some time trying to learn to use it. I've also tried some of the online docs. They haven't helped much. When I work through the examples, I generally have two sorts of reactions: 1) What the hell did it do to the image? That wasn't at all what I expected, and it doesn't make much sense; and 2) How do I tell it to make the kinds of changes that I want?
Does this book work for someone who doesn't already know the jargon? Can a total newbie to image editing use it to trick GIMP into making desired changes, and not just uncontrolled damage to images?
Is this a good teaching manual for GIMP, that doesn't assume that you already know the inside jargon at the start? I can't really tell from the review, which was by a self-described "insider". NTTAWWT, but it'd be nice to know that this book won't be the waste of funds that a couple of others have been for someone who doesn't yet know how such things are supposed to work.
Ripping a CD by playing it through speakers and copying it into your brain is also stealing. It's just a matter of time before Sony, the RIAA, and others with Intellectual Property to protect are chasing down those criminals among us that rip off the starving artists by wantonly copying purchased CDs not just to their computers or their iPods, but also into their brains.
The iPod is really just an enabling device. The real crime is that final copy, which isn't authorized in writing by any license that I've ever read.
While science and religion generally are orthogonal, various religions play nicer than others. A religion that contains a way for conducting a government, such as Islam, is going to be in your nickers a lot more than a religion that preaches love and persuasion by kindness, such as Christianity.
Of course, it's a lot more complicated than that. Various historians have suggested that it was no accident that the main part of the industrial and scientific "revolution" of the past few centuries happened mainly in the Protestant parts of Europe. The Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christianity have had a long history of interfering with science, as their leaders have decided on various theological grounds that science threatens their religion.
Galileo is the poster boy for this, of course, but there are hundreds of other examples. It's not really obvious why the Catholic church's leaders would consider detailed astronomical knowledge a religious threat, since the bible really isn't an astronomy text. But they did, even going so far as to say that Jupiter's satellites couldn't exist. Such things did have a retarding effect on science in countries that gave the church political power. For whatever reason, Protestant leaders rarely considered such things of theological interest, so even where they had power, they didn't much impede scientific work. We even have examples of Protestant ministers such as Charles Darwin who contributed to science.
There are exceptions to this, of course, and Protestant suppression of knowledge is well known. Here in the US, we've seen a significant impact on some sorts of biological science since the 2000 election and the takeover of the Republican party by Christian fundamentalists. Most of the media attention has gone to the stem-cell issue. For some inexplicable reason the fundies decided that stem cells are involved in reproduction, and since anything dealing with sex must be suppressed, this research had to be stopped. They haven't been totally successful at this, but with the help of George Bush, they've managed to have a "chilling effect" that has blocked much of that research or pushed it out to other parts of the world.
More generally, Christian fundamentalists have succeeded in eliminating the teaching of evolution in American schools below the college level. This has produced a profound ignorance of basic biology in the American population (and government funding agencies).
This is fairly similar to what happened with Lysenkoism in the USSR. In that case, the Communists decided that some biological theories were in conflict with Communist doctrine, and did their best to suppress the study or teaching of such theories. Unfortunately for their science and agriculture, Lysenko was wrong, and the suppressed theories were (mostly) right. Any number of historians have pointed out that Communism (of the Marxism/Leninism sort) really was a religion, with sacred texts and prophets that must be followed blindly, so this compares directly with suppression of science by state-supported religious institutions.
In any case, the real problem is dogmatic belief systems. The main examples of these are what we call religions, but there are others that are just as bad. Since science only advances if people are allowed to examine and test current theories and discuss alternatives, any dogmas imposed by rulers will interfere with scientific advancement.
All true. But I've read a number of histories that made an interesting point about medical research: There was a limit on how far medicine could advance in a Muslim society, due to the ban on images of the human body. Past a certain point, further research (and most education) becomes very difficult unless your medical texts can contain images of (parts of) human bodies. Image processing is an important part of current medical research, and eliminating images of bodies would totally destroy most modern medical texts.
;-).
I don't suppose fields like physics or astronomy would be limited by this, though. Nor would software development (though there are some interesting disputes about the Internet in the Middle East
Not even a little dagger in the back. Come on guys!
;-)
Well, some of the folks here seem to have taken care of that oversight.
If, as is the prevailing view on Slashdot, any curbs on entertainment are wrong, why are we supporting curbs on software use -- by, for example, cheering the GPL-enforcement litigation?
Well, one possibility is that a lot of people here would prefer weaker copyright laws for both entertainment and software. The problem, which a lot of us understand, is that under the current laws in the US and most other countries, it doesn't work to just release your software as public domain. There is a history of companies taking public software and asserting their own copyright claim over it. People have found that they don't have the legal right to use their own software, after some corporation has started selling it.
One of the functions of the GPL is to use copyright against itself, in a sense. By aggressively claiming copyright but providing an automatic free license to everyone, you stand a good chance of being able to use your own software in the indefinite future. And by requiring that "derived works" be released under the same free license, you interfere with the natural desire of corporations to fork your work and not "pay" you by sharing their improvements with you.
To those with an "information wants to be free" ideology, this is probably the best that can be done under current laws. You really have little choice but to claim your own copyright in self defense. But schemes like the GPL let you get close to the state of freedom and cooperative development that you'd like.
Currently, there's no hope that the copyright laws will be relaxed anywhere. The natural tendency of corporate bribery (I mean campaign contributions) is to make such laws more restrictive over time. About all we can really do is try to find ways to subvert such a system. We can't fix it, but maybe we can trick it into enforcing open publication and cooperative development.
One reason for cheering GPL-enforcement litigation is that the anti-FOSS folks have been arguing that the GPL can't be trusted because it has never been tested in court. Lawyers might point out that this is because they advise their clients that if you fight the GPL, you'll lose and it'll cost you. But this doesn't register with the political system, and most managers continue to insist that court tests are necessary before they'll consider using GPL'd software. So if we want GPL'd software to make inroads into business settings, having a few actual court cases to point to is probably a good idea. Depending on what the courts say, of course, and we really don't know what that will be until it happens. Courts have this way of confounding the expectations of even the expert lawyers, and how many judges have any idea what this "software" stuff is all about?
A legal dispute was settled amicably? Who'd of thunk such a thing was possible? Where were the lawyers when this was going on? Did someone take them off and get them drunk or something?