Re:Too recent & controversial for an encyclope
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 1
In other words, it's a convenient place to look up easily verifiable facts.
There is some truth in that - but facts that aren't verifiable don't belong in an encyclopedia because there is too much risk that they aren't facts at all. If the fact is hard to verify, it's hard to get it into the encyclopedia - and there is nothing wrong with merely cataloging easily verifiable stuff because there is a lot of convenience to having all of those facts marshalled together, cross-linked and referenced in one handy web site.
In my examples above (all written by me incidentally), some facts WERE easy to verify (the engine size of the Mini and the number of red squirrels in a litter for example) - others were hard.
For the student prank at the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge, I noticed that the car that was allegedly dangled under the bridge was not manufactured until two years after the prank was alleged to happen. It took over a month of emailing around to finally get an email from a librarian at Cambridge who sent me scans of two newspaper articles with photos of TWO very similar pranks - separated in time by 10 years. Those two pranks have been merged together into one in the minds of many people (no helped by the fact that ALL of the Cambridge tour guides tell the broken version of the story!) - and my research has set the record straight.
That's definitely not an easily verifiable fact (although it IS verifiable).
Re:Too recent & controversial for an encyclope
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 3, Informative
I think the correct solution in this case it not to argue content but to file a 'Request for Deletion' - explaining that the term is a neologism. That - together with the "No original research" rule should get rid of the offending article in short order.
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 3, Informative
What they should do is have a version of Wikipedia that has already been verified by a community of editors.
Which part of 1.2 MILLION articles didn't you understand?
You have to understand the sheer size of the undertaking you propose...it's quite utterly out of the question:
340 million words.
50,000 articles added every month.
If you printed it out in the same format as the Encyclopedia Britannica it would fill 240 VOLUMES!
3.7 million changes every month.
How the heck do you review something that big?
The answer is that only a community the size of the Wikipedia contributors can possibly review something this big - so community review is the ONLY answer.
Since the number of changes per month (3.7 million) vastly exceeds the article creation rate per month (50,000) - you can tell that this process is in fact working.
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 5, Informative
Does a group of editors systematically tag all the articles at some point.
There is just too much stuff to do that methodically. 50,000 articles are added every month - just think about how many people would have be there to check them all!
Instead there are a few parallel 'top-down' efforts to make an extra-high-quality core by picking the key articles in every major subject area and flagging the stable versions. One effort is thinking in terms of a printed paper version of Wikipedia - another is looking into doing a CD-ROM version. The articles that make it into these special collections are carefully vetted and tagged - so you know that there is a stable 'known good' version backing up the latest version. However, these barely scratch the surface of the problem.
Additionally, there is a bottom-up process by which article authors can attempt to get their articles recognised for high quality. You first nominate your article for 'peer review' - reviewers monitor this list and come along to check your article. If you pass you can go on to request 'Good Article' status - another round of reviews. Next you can try for the coveted "Featured article" status (there are just over 1000 of these so far) - you get pummeled by English majors and pedants of every stripe - if you pass that then you can try to get your article into 'Article of the Day' - with yet another round of reviews.
Yet another layer is the 'Portal' system. Check out 'Portal:Automobile' for example - it covers the subset of Wikipedia articles about cars. Many portals have their own quality assurance methods and standards enforcement groups.
These quality processes work well - but there just aren't enough reviewers to effectively check the 1.2 million English language articles - let alone all of the ones written in French, Portugese...etc. Remember - English language Wikipedia is growing at a rate faster than any human can read. Nobody will ever be able to read all of it - even if they make it's their life's work.
Re:Add a stability value to a page?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 4, Informative
Maybe an additional bit of information could be a stability index. How much of the page has changed, both recently, and over time.
Look at the little row of tabs at the top of every Wikipedia page. See the one marked 'history'? Click on that. You are now looking at a complete history of edits to that page. The handle of everyone who edited it, the date and time it was edited and the commit comment they attached to it. Isn't that enough?
You can click the radio buttons to the left and get a side-by-side comparison of the article as it was at any times in the past or you can see the entire article exactly as it was on any given date. You can click on the author's name and send them a message on their 'Talk' page if you want to ask about why they changed whatever they changed. You can go to the 'Talk' page for the article itself and see comments from the various editors - heck, you can even get a history of the edits to the Talk page!
Generally, if there are a lot of 'rv: vandalism' entries on the history page (eg on the "Computer" article that gets vandalised a lot) - then perhaps the article itself is pretty stable - but gets a lot of editing history because people are fixing up the actions of complete idiots. If on the other hand there is some kind of 'edit war' between two editors - then this is still a controversial subject - so treat the article with care. If the article had a busy period for some days or weeks - but then all the subsequent edits were spelling fixes, addition of foreign language versions and stuff like that - then this is a stable and trustworthy article.
The number of References at the bottom of the article is another good gauge of quality.
"History is written by the victors." - Winston Churchill
People with good writing skills win battles. - Me,
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 2, Informative
For example, Wikipedia could remain as quick-moving as it was when any AC could change the "latest" version, but I wish old versions were "tagged" as "accurate" by "editors".
Actually, that DOES happen. Featured articles are tagged at the release they were reviewed at.
Wikipedia is not ridiculous if you use it like you would a big, heavy 40 volume paper encyclopedia. That's what it's for. If you want news go to the BBC or NYTimes or something.
If you look up something that's been known for more than a few months - the facts are there - they are about as reliable as any paper encyclopedia (this has been well established in MANY independent tests) - and the coverage is vastly better than any paper encyclopedia...particularly on subjects considered too low-brow or too high-brow for paper encyclopedias.
What Wikipedia isn't good at is as a newspaper. There simply isn't time for the community editing process to settle down for something as recent and controversial as Ken Lay's death. Come back in a few months - I personally guarantee that this page will be well researched, annotated with references for you to go and check if you desire and quite stable.
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 5, Insightful
So look up pairs of movies in IMDB and Wikipedia and see which has the best coverage. I think Wikipedia wins every time...especially for new releases.
Movies are easy to get right - it's politics and religion and controversial stuff that's hard to do well. You can't get the sheer volume of stuff that Wikipedia has by reviewing everything. Wikipedia is growing at a rate significantly faster than a human can read - no one person could read it all - much less review it.
Wikipedia grows by 50,000 articles a month. If your hypothetical reviewer reviewed a couple of articles a day - Wikipedia would need over 1,000 reviewers - some of whom would have to be experts in extremely narrow fields. It's all very well to have a few movie buffs keep track of a few dozen movie facts per day - but the only way to handle a problem the size of Wikipedia is to have the general public do the reviewing as well as the writing - which is precisely what happens.
Too recent & controversial for an encyclopedia
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I would agree that Wikipedia is poor at reporting stories that are both recent AND controversial - but to be fair, I don't think those are the kinds of things you should be looking up in an encyclopedia anyway. Look back at this same article in six months and I guarantee it'll be correct and unbiassed. It just takes time for the community to settle on the right wording.
Things that are NOT recent but ARE controversial ('Religion' or 'Area 51'for example) are generally well written, correct and take a carefully neutral stance. Things that are recent but NOT controversial (say "2006 World Cup Soccer") are well reported immediately and bang up to date with all the right facts.
It's the intersection of recent and controversial that messes up the system because too many people are editing at once and a lot of them are nut jobs. Once the topic gets old or becomes uncontroversial, the lunatic fringe loses interest and good writing can take place.
On the other hand, if you want to know the engine capacity of a 1963 Austin Min i or the number of casualties in the RAF Faulds explosion or the exact nature o f the student prank involving the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge or the size of a
litter of European Red Squirrels - things that I consult an encyclopedia for rather than a newspaper - then there is no other place (on the web or otherwise) to touch what Wikipedia has done.
The world needs a human population of around a million people - no more.
Getting there from here is the entire problem.
With a million people, our gene pool would be plenty large enough - we'd have enough skills to cover all the bases and make modest scientific and cultural progress - our polluting ways would be scarcely noticable - we'd be unable to occupy enough of a niche in the ecosystem to damage any part of it irreperably. There would be enough people to make a handful of decent cities - for people who like that kind of thing - but there would be enough land that if you wanted to live 100 miles from your neighbour, you could certainly do that.
We just don't need more people than that. But how do we get there from here?
In reality, you'd use a thin gelatin 'patch' - you can stick one of these onto your finger - it's thin, translucent - it would be almost indetectable...and since gelatin is edible, you'd have a really easy way to dispose of the evidence.
Besides, you pay while the cashier is scanning stuff and filling bags - they are way too busy to watch you scan your print.
Heck, I have a photo of myself on my Bank of America credit card - they don't even look at that. At some stores (Home Depot for example) the payment machine even tells you "Please show card to cashier" - and they never even bother to look.
For credit cards, they are SUPPOSED to compare your signature on the payment slip to the one on the back of the card. I don't think I've *ever* seen them do that.
So even the simplest biometrics (your photo and your signature) aren't checked...I think you could pay with a gummibear and nobody would be likely to notice...but with a thin gelatin patch - I doubt they'd be able to tell even if they happened to look at the moment you scanned it.
"Omnipotence could perhaps be better rendered as 'the greatest power that implies no contradictions', otherwise it becomes a joke concept, as your example shows."
Right - so God can EITHER make a poptart so hot that he really can't pick it up - OR he can pick up infinitely hot poptarts - but not both. Who decides which is the limitation on his power?
However, this limitation doesn't help us much. My 'Eric the Purple Dinosaur' example contains no contradictions (that I can imagine). His special 'magic' power is pretty limited - indeed one could perhaps imagine such a power existing within the laws of physics as we know them. However, even with such a relatively limited ability to mess with your mind - you have no way to falsify the theory of his existance.
This more limited definition of omnipotence is interesting though - it suggests that (for example) God could not choose a different value for PI or make it possible to trisect an angle using only ruler and compasses because to do so would cause all sorts of messy contradictions. However, did the church find out that this was a limitation on omnipotence by some reference in the ancient sources - or did the poptart argument force them into this definition? I suspect the latter - which is just a way of saying "You scientists can't even attempt to prove the existance of God by looking for any contradictions that he may have left lying around" - and "You can't use the 'poptart' argument to disprove his omnipotence and thereby demonstrate his non-existance".
"Wow, did you actually read the article that you linked against? That basically had nothing to do with gummibears-- the example of them was only as FUD against biometrics. The real techniques required circuts, cameras and chemistery."
Yes - I did read it. As I understand it, the process is:
1) Use some cyanoacrylate (superglue) - just as the police forensics guys do - to 'develop' the latent print into something you can see. 2) Photograph it with a regular digital camera. 3) Print the photo (using your computer) onto an overhead transparency at 1:1 scale. 4) Use that - with some photo-etch circuit board materials (from Radio Shack) and a UV lamp to etch the print onto a copper clad circuit board. 5) Use the board as a mold to make gelatin prints which you can use directly - or make thin enough to stick onto your fingertip for covert use.
The last step can supposedly be done by pressing a gummibear onto the circuit board. (Hey if you get caught, you can eat the evidence....mmmmmm gummy!)
This doesn't sound exactly trivial to do - but the rewards for success would make it worth it for a bad guy to practice and perfect - and it's suitable for mass-production of prints taken (for example) from car door handles in a supermarket parking lot.
The odds of getting caught are small - I presume these scanners fail to read prints some of the time - so it's not like alarms are going to go off or anything.
The article said it worked four times out of five on each of a dozen different fingerprint scanners they tested against. That's plenty good enough odds for the bad guy - he can make a dozen different prints from different people - and the odds are good that one of them will work.
That might work - but it's a pretty flimsy solution for a serious security problem. If gummibears didn't work, just how long do you think it would take for the bad guys to figure out how to take a latex mold or something.
It's not enough to make it a bit harder - you have to make it virtually impossible.
Worse still - once someone has cloned your fingerprint, what do you do about it? If someone clones your credit card you can phone the card company and they put a stop on that card and issue a new one. This happened to me last week - it was inconvenient - but no worse.
If someone has your fingerprint then....what? They put a stop on your print - but now you can't buy anything anymore. Presumably there would still be a way to use a card or a pin number or something - but this would be something that would affect you for the rest of your life!
Biometrics are a useful way to ADD security to an existing token-based system - my credit card has my photo on it - that helps. But biometrics can't be the ONLY part of the system.
"but there is usefulness if your belief in god fuels your curiosity about the universe."
For me, it would have completely the opposite effect. Knowing that all that there is to know about the universe is at least potentially accessible to me through thought, logic and experiment certainly makes me want to go out and figure stuff out.
If I believed that some uber-being could snap his fingers and make absolutely any arbitary thing happen (or *seem* to happen) - then there is simply no way for me to be able to apply any kind of reason to anything. So I might as well give up trying to work anything out. Suppose I'm Darwin. I study Finches in the Galapagos - I figure out how the rich variety of life came about - I feel fulfilled. Then someone tells me that God snapped his fingers and made all this happen - and that he deliberately planted all this fake evidence that I've been reasoning about as a test of my faith (which I presumably just failed)...Geez - what a downer!
No - God couldn't inspire me at all - quite the opposite in fact.
"I believe that God=universe, he doesnt make it work, he IS IT. By understanding the universe we are understanding the nature of God himself. I could even say thet God is a placeholder for missing knowledge at any level. Once a question has an answer it displaces the magical properties of God with a reapetable pattern. I think fear of the unknown applies to knowledge and it gives me comfort to know that there is already an answer for eveything... we just have to find the right question."
So all you've done is redefine the conventional meaning of one word ("God") to mean something else ("The set of things we don't currently understand about the universe"). I'm not talking about the theory of "The things that I don't yet understand" - I'm talking about the theory that all these religious nuts are propounding. Your definition of God is one where God has to hide in the dark corners where science hasn't shined a bright enough light yet...OK - whatever does it for you - but that's not the theory of the omnipotent being that the Bible talks about.
It's hard to imagine anything that's more personally sensitive than SWIFT banking transactions - and they gave those records up to the US government in no time flat!
These days you have to assume that any item of data you give to anyone is insecure from that point on.
Didn't Slashdot run a story a while back about a supermarket fingerprint pay system that was tried a year or so ago? It could be faked out REALLY easily using a Gummibear.
I can't find the slashdot story - but check this out for example:
Does this new gizmo do something magical to avoid this rather easy attack?
Just google gummibear and fingerprint and you'll find a gazillion How To articles.
If the biometrics guys are 'a bit puzzled by customer privacy fears" then they are horribly ill-informed!
I can avoid leaving my credit card lying around for someone to steal - but it's very hard indeed to avoid leaving my fingerprints in all sorts of public places. If I could find out how to defeat their scanner so easily with about 10 seconds of Googling - you can be very sure that the bad guys will be lining up.
I'm not against the money grab. Someone has to pay for whatever functions these taxes cover - and taxing communications is as reasonable as most of the other things that are taxed.
The problem is that this is a fuzzy definition. Taxing telephones made sense when they were single function devices for carrying realtime analog voice from A to B. When Fax machines appeared, it still made sense - when dialup modems showed up it made sense because all data was taxed uniformly.
This new thing makes no sense - if you send a picture by connecting your fax machine to VOIP then you are taxed. If you email the same picture, you aren't. If you phone someone up using VOIP and get their voicemail, you leave a recording of your voice and are taxed for doing it. But if you email them a WAV file containing that exact same recording - no tax.
These distinctions will become more and more tricky to separate out.
If I play Battlefield II online - I can chat with other players - no tax. If I call them up using Vonage - tax.
If I want to save money, I should chat with my Mom via Battlefield II.
Then there is software like Ventrilo - end to end VOIP with no service provider involved. How can that be taxed?
This all makes no sense at all. You either have to tax all communications or none of it because it's nonsensical to talk about only taxing bytes which happen to contain realtime acoustic pressures.
So what about audio chat inside online computer games? I can talk to other players in - how is that different from telephony?
If I'm taxed for talking to someone using VOIP but not when I happen to be playing a game at the time - then maybe VOIP providers should include a copy of PONG that you can play with the other person while you talk to them?
The idea that you can tax bytes that contain the human voice in realtime - but you don't tax bytes that contain pictures, or human voice that was recorded a few hours ago...of all the millions of uses for data sent over the Internet - why should realtime human voice be singled out as special. It's just silly.
We either need to tax ALL data transfers over shared communications links or NONE of them. Repeal the tax on telephony or tax broadband the same way you tax dialled telephony - there is no practical difference.
Hmmm - so if I use dialup to connect to the Internet - and then use VOIP - do I get taxed twice? I think that's probably illegal.
"There are plenty of concrete predictions made in bible, unfortunately people didn't believe them until they happened so they didn't promote them. Now that they have happened they are nothing new."
You aren't thinking big enough. The bible says that there are NO LIMITS on God's power. So - if you believe in the theory of God - then you know that God has the power to fake the bible, fake those things it predicted, change your memory to only make you believe that you read those things (or that they happened). You know nothing for sure.
So - I can't possibly convince you that the God theory is false - there is absolutely no way for me to do that - and indeed it might quite possibly be true.
I don't use the God theory (which is a way of saying that I don't believe in God) - but that's not because I can't prove it - or because I've found some amazing proof of his non-existance. It's simply not a useful theory...it brings no predictions that I can use.
Occams razor say I should ignore it...along with the theory of little green aliens...along with an infinite number of possible theories that predict nothing and are non-falsifiable.
"First thing is that Jews will be scattered, and in the final days they will be gathered around the earth back to israel and all nations between ethiopia and persia will go together a war against Israel... Thats one prediction that has happened. Unfortunately for us all God didn't put dates in which the predictions would come true."
Well, if you DON'T include the God theory as an axiom in the system, then you can write this off as a misreading, a mistranslation, a coincidence...there are lots of ways for science to show that this is not convinving proof of anything. I'm pretty sure you could find a good number of predictions the bible makes that didn't come true too - but God might have put them there to test our faith (just like all those dinosaur fossils).
Not falsifiable==Not useful. No testable predictions==Not useful.
"There is another point, while the God theory isn't good alone. Lets consider a bible theory, I have one question. If right now, someone would make complete bull shit stories about soviet union, inside todays russia. Would they A) be laughted off as totally false. B) believed by people. Its just that the new testament was written off a public figure in a time when people who lived through its happenings. The it would of been bullshitting the movement that was called christianity after wards wouldn't of survived its first few decades. These are few points made by an ex-atheist historian who tried to falsify bible based on historical context, he failed and became christian."
YIKES! Failure to falsify isn't the same as "prove".
I claim (and I'm going to write it down in this little book that I'll call "The Bibble") that you, personally have a large purple dinosaur following you around wherever you go. The dinosaur (his name is "Eric") has just one power - he can change the firing potential of the neurons of any human within 10 feet of His Scaley Presence. This means that you can't see him (and even if you could - he'd erase your memory of him). People who stand 20' away can see him easily - but you don't hear us telling you about him.
There is absolutely no way for you to disprove the Bibble. For you, it's unfalsifiable.
Do you believe in Eric? By your criteria, you should. You can't falsify it...it's impossible because everything you know might have been changed by Eric's ability to rewrite your brain. You should immediately give up your non-Eric-believing stance and become an Ericist fanatic from this moment on.
Eric's powers are a LOT more limited than God's - there are lots of things Eric can't do - but he's unfalsifiable - so you MUST believe in him if you believe in God.
"Nazareth and several other towns alleged to have existed during the alleged life of Jesus have been demonstrated not to have existed during the period 0 to 50 of the Common Era."
But that's the problem with the existance of God as a scientific theory. We have PLENTY of solid scientific evidence of evolution and the origins of the universe tracked back to the first few femtoseconds - but these (along with the problems with those towns not existing back then) are useless in falsifying the God-theory because God can do absolutely anything at all. Hence, just as he might have faked all the evidence of evolution and the big-bang in order to test our faith, he might have faked the evidence that those towns didn't exist - or he might have rewritten all of those bibles last week and adjusted your memory to make you believe you've known about them all your life.
You see an omnipotent being simply makes ALL assumptions utterly invalid. It's like being inside The Matrix - nothing you think you know - nothing you can reason about - nothing you can find, measure, hold in your hand...absolutely nothing is knowable if you try to include the 'God theory' into your science.
So we have a choice: Either include God as an axiom - and give up thinking because it's pointless...or simply exclude the God theory and get on with making those Jet Packs.
The only way to admit a God theory into science is to have a God theory in which there is at least one teeny-tiny thing that God Can't Do. If there was something, we could concieve of a test that would falsify his existance and start to plan experiments that would allow us to test that. We could maybe even use that one teeny-tiny *fact* to build a useful existance. But when absolutely nothing is knowable for sure - because an utterly omnipotent being can change everything - we might as well curl up into a ball and wait for the rapture (unless God faked the evidence for that too).
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, it's a convenient place to look up easily verifiable facts.
There is some truth in that - but facts that aren't verifiable don't belong in an encyclopedia because there is too much risk that they aren't facts at all. If the fact is hard to verify, it's hard to get it into the encyclopedia - and there is nothing wrong with merely cataloging easily verifiable stuff because there is a lot of convenience to having all of those facts marshalled together, cross-linked and referenced in one handy web site.
In my examples above (all written by me incidentally), some facts WERE easy to verify (the engine size of the Mini and the number of red squirrels in a litter for example) - others were hard.
For the student prank at the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge, I noticed that the car that was allegedly dangled under the bridge was not manufactured until two years after the prank was alleged to happen. It took over a month of emailing around to finally get an email from a librarian at Cambridge who sent me scans of two newspaper articles with photos of TWO very similar pranks - separated in time by 10 years. Those two pranks have been merged together into one in the minds of many people (no helped by the fact that ALL of the Cambridge tour guides tell the broken version of the story!) - and my research has set the record straight.
That's definitely not an easily verifiable fact (although it IS verifiable).
I think the correct solution in this case it not to argue content but to file a 'Request for Deletion' - explaining that the term is a neologism. That - together with the "No original research" rule should get rid of the offending article in short order.
What they should do is have a version of Wikipedia that has already been verified by a community of editors.
Which part of 1.2 MILLION articles didn't you understand?
You have to understand the sheer size of the undertaking you propose...it's quite utterly out of the question:
340 million words.
50,000 articles added every month.
If you printed it out in the same format as the Encyclopedia Britannica it would fill 240 VOLUMES!
3.7 million changes every month.
How the heck do you review something that big?
The answer is that only a community the size of the Wikipedia contributors can possibly review something this big - so community review is the ONLY answer.
Since the number of changes per month (3.7 million) vastly exceeds the article creation rate per month (50,000) - you can tell that this process is in fact working.
Does a group of editors systematically tag all the articles at some point.
There is just too much stuff to do that methodically. 50,000 articles are added every month - just think about how many people would have be there to check them all!
Instead there are a few parallel 'top-down' efforts to make an extra-high-quality core by picking the key articles in every major subject area and flagging the stable versions. One effort is thinking in terms of a printed paper version of Wikipedia - another is looking into doing a CD-ROM version. The articles that make it into these special collections are carefully vetted and tagged - so you know that there is a stable 'known good' version backing up the latest version. However, these barely scratch the surface of the problem.
Additionally, there is a bottom-up process by which article authors can attempt to get their articles recognised for high quality. You first nominate your article for 'peer review' - reviewers monitor this list and come along to check your article. If you pass you can go on to request 'Good Article' status - another round of reviews. Next you can try for the coveted "Featured article" status (there are just over 1000 of these so far) - you get pummeled by English majors and pedants of every stripe - if you pass that then you can try to get your article into 'Article of the Day' - with yet another round of reviews.
Yet another layer is the 'Portal' system. Check out 'Portal:Automobile' for example - it covers the subset of Wikipedia articles about cars. Many portals have their own quality assurance methods and standards enforcement groups.
These quality processes work well - but there just aren't enough reviewers to effectively check the 1.2 million English language articles - let alone all of the ones written in French, Portugese...etc. Remember - English language Wikipedia is growing at a rate faster than any human can read. Nobody will ever be able to read all of it - even if they make it's their life's work.
Look at the little row of tabs at the top of every Wikipedia page. See the one marked 'history'? Click on that. You are now looking at a complete history of edits to that page. The handle of everyone who edited it, the date and time it was edited and the commit comment they attached to it. Isn't that enough?
You can click the radio buttons to the left and get a side-by-side comparison of the article as it was at any times in the past or you can see the entire article exactly as it was on any given date. You can click on the author's name and send them a message on their 'Talk' page if you want to ask about why they changed whatever they changed. You can go to the 'Talk' page for the article itself and see comments from the various editors - heck, you can even get a history of the edits to the Talk page!
Generally, if there are a lot of 'rv: vandalism' entries on the history page (eg on the "Computer" article that gets vandalised a lot) - then perhaps the article itself is pretty stable - but gets a lot of editing history because people are fixing up the actions of complete idiots. If on the other hand there is some kind of 'edit war' between two editors - then this is still a controversial subject - so treat the article with care. If the article had a busy period for some days or weeks - but then all the subsequent edits were spelling fixes, addition of foreign language versions and stuff like that - then this is a stable and trustworthy article.
The number of References at the bottom of the article is another good gauge of quality.
People with good writing skills win battles. - Me,
Actually, that DOES happen. Featured articles are tagged at the release they were reviewed at.
Wikipedia is not ridiculous if you use it like you would a big, heavy 40 volume paper encyclopedia. That's what it's for. If you want news go to the BBC or NYTimes or something.
If you look up something that's been known for more than a few months - the facts are there - they are about as reliable as any paper encyclopedia (this has been well established in MANY independent tests) - and the coverage is vastly better than any paper encyclopedia...particularly on subjects considered too low-brow or too high-brow for paper encyclopedias.
What Wikipedia isn't good at is as a newspaper. There simply isn't time for the community editing process to settle down for something as recent and controversial as Ken Lay's death. Come back in a few months - I personally guarantee that this page will be well researched, annotated with references for you to go and check if you desire and quite stable.
So look up pairs of movies in IMDB and Wikipedia and see which has the best coverage. I think Wikipedia wins every time...especially for new releases.
Movies are easy to get right - it's politics and religion and controversial stuff that's hard to do well. You can't get the sheer volume of stuff that Wikipedia has by reviewing everything. Wikipedia is growing at a rate significantly faster than a human can read - no one person could read it all - much less review it.
Wikipedia grows by 50,000 articles a month. If your hypothetical reviewer reviewed a couple of articles a day - Wikipedia would need over 1,000 reviewers - some of whom would have to be experts in extremely narrow fields. It's all very well to have a few movie buffs keep track of a few dozen movie facts per day - but the only way to handle a problem the size of Wikipedia is to have the general public do the reviewing as well as the writing - which is precisely what happens.
I would agree that Wikipedia is poor at reporting stories that are both recent AND controversial - but to be fair, I don't think those are the kinds of things you should be looking up in an encyclopedia anyway. Look back at this same article in six months and I guarantee it'll be correct and unbiassed. It just takes time for the community to settle on the right wording.
Things that are NOT recent but ARE controversial ('Religion' or 'Area 51'for example) are generally well written, correct and take a carefully neutral stance. Things that are recent but NOT controversial (say "2006 World Cup Soccer") are well reported immediately and bang up to date with all the right facts.
It's the intersection of recent and controversial that messes up the system because too many people are editing at once and a lot of them are nut jobs. Once the topic gets old or becomes uncontroversial, the lunatic fringe loses interest and good writing can take place.
On the other hand, if you want to know the engine capacity of a 1963 Austin Min
i or the number of casualties in the RAF Faulds explosion or the exact nature o
f the student prank involving the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge or the size of a
litter of European Red Squirrels - things that I consult an encyclopedia for rather than a newspaper - then there is no other place (on the web or otherwise) to touch what Wikipedia has done.
The world needs a human population of around a million people - no more.
Getting there from here is the entire problem.
With a million people, our gene pool would be plenty large enough - we'd have enough skills to cover all the bases and make modest scientific and cultural progress - our polluting ways would be scarcely noticable - we'd be unable to occupy enough of a niche in the ecosystem to damage any part of it irreperably. There would be enough people to make a handful of decent cities - for people who like that kind of thing - but there would be enough land that if you wanted to live 100 miles from your neighbour, you could certainly do that.
We just don't need more people than that. But how do we get there from here?
In reality, you'd use a thin gelatin 'patch' - you can stick one of these onto your finger - it's thin, translucent - it would be almost indetectable...and since gelatin is edible, you'd have a really easy way to dispose of the evidence.
Besides, you pay while the cashier is scanning stuff and filling bags - they are way too busy to watch you scan your print.
Heck, I have a photo of myself on my Bank of America credit card - they don't even look at that. At some stores (Home Depot for example) the payment machine even tells you "Please show card to cashier" - and they never even bother to look.
For credit cards, they are SUPPOSED to compare your signature on the payment slip to the one on the back of the card. I don't think I've *ever* seen them do that.
So even the simplest biometrics (your photo and your signature) aren't checked...I think you could pay with a gummibear and nobody would be likely to notice...but with a thin gelatin patch - I doubt they'd be able to tell even if they happened to look at the moment you scanned it.
"Omnipotence could perhaps be better rendered as 'the greatest power that implies no contradictions', otherwise it becomes a joke concept, as your example shows."
Right - so God can EITHER make a poptart so hot that he really can't pick it up - OR he can pick up infinitely hot poptarts - but not both. Who decides which is the limitation on his power?
However, this limitation doesn't help us much. My 'Eric the Purple Dinosaur' example contains no contradictions (that I can imagine). His special 'magic' power is pretty limited - indeed one could perhaps imagine such a power existing within the laws of physics as we know them. However, even with such a relatively limited ability to mess with your mind - you have no way to falsify the theory of his existance.
This more limited definition of omnipotence is interesting though - it suggests that (for example) God could not choose a different value for PI or make it possible to trisect an angle using only ruler and compasses because to do so would cause all sorts of messy contradictions. However, did the church find out that this was a limitation on omnipotence by some reference in the ancient sources - or did the poptart argument force them into this definition? I suspect the latter - which is just a way of saying "You scientists can't even attempt to prove the existance of God by looking for any contradictions that he may have left lying around" - and "You can't use the 'poptart' argument to disprove his omnipotence and thereby demonstrate his non-existance".
This doesn't really help the case.
...with photo:
m /ECN-13302B.jpg
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/AD-1/Mediu
Hmmm - NASA had one of those flying back in 1982!
, 949473,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/archive/printout/0,23657
"Wow, did you actually read the article that you linked against? That basically had nothing to do with gummibears-- the example of them was only as FUD against biometrics. The real techniques required circuts, cameras and chemistery."
Yes - I did read it. As I understand it, the process is:
1) Use some cyanoacrylate (superglue) - just as the police forensics guys do - to 'develop' the latent print into something you can see.
2) Photograph it with a regular digital camera.
3) Print the photo (using your computer) onto an overhead transparency at 1:1 scale.
4) Use that - with some photo-etch circuit board materials (from Radio Shack) and a UV lamp to etch the print onto a copper clad circuit board.
5) Use the board as a mold to make gelatin prints which you can use directly - or make thin enough to stick onto your fingertip for covert use.
The last step can supposedly be done by pressing a gummibear onto the circuit board. (Hey if you get caught, you can eat the evidence....mmmmmm gummy!)
This doesn't sound exactly trivial to do - but the rewards for success would make it worth it for a bad guy to practice and perfect - and it's suitable for mass-production of prints taken (for example) from car door handles in a supermarket parking lot.
The odds of getting caught are small - I presume these scanners fail to read prints some of the time - so it's not like alarms are going to go off or anything.
The article said it worked four times out of five on each of a dozen different fingerprint scanners they tested against. That's plenty good enough odds for the bad guy - he can make a dozen different prints from different people - and the odds are good that one of them will work.
That might work - but it's a pretty flimsy solution for a serious security problem. If gummibears didn't work, just how long do you think it would take for the bad guys to figure out how to take a latex mold or something.
It's not enough to make it a bit harder - you have to make it virtually impossible.
Worse still - once someone has cloned your fingerprint, what do you do about it? If someone clones your credit card you can phone the card company and they put a stop on that card and issue a new one. This happened to me last week - it was inconvenient - but no worse.
If someone has your fingerprint then....what? They put a stop on your print - but now you can't buy anything anymore. Presumably there would still be a way to use a card or a pin number or something - but this would be something that would affect you for the rest of your life!
Biometrics are a useful way to ADD security to an existing token-based system - my credit card has my photo on it - that helps. But biometrics can't be the ONLY part of the system.
"but there is usefulness if your belief in god fuels your curiosity about the universe."
For me, it would have completely the opposite effect. Knowing that all that there is to know about the universe is at least potentially accessible to me through thought, logic and experiment certainly makes me want to go out and figure stuff out.
If I believed that some uber-being could snap his fingers and make absolutely any arbitary thing happen (or *seem* to happen) - then there is simply no way for me to be able to apply any kind of reason to anything. So I might as well give up trying to work anything out. Suppose I'm Darwin. I study Finches in the Galapagos - I figure out how the rich variety of life came about - I feel fulfilled. Then someone tells me that God snapped his fingers and made all this happen - and that he deliberately planted all this fake evidence that I've been reasoning about as a test of my faith (which I presumably just failed)...Geez - what a downer!
No - God couldn't inspire me at all - quite the opposite in fact.
"I believe that God=universe, he doesnt make it work, he IS IT. By understanding the universe we are understanding the nature of God himself. I could even say thet God is a placeholder for missing knowledge at any level. Once a question has an answer it displaces the magical properties of God with a reapetable pattern. I think fear of the unknown applies to knowledge and it gives me comfort to know that there is already an answer for eveything... we just have to find the right question."
So all you've done is redefine the conventional meaning of one word ("God") to mean something else ("The set of things we don't currently understand about the universe"). I'm not talking about the theory of "The things that I don't yet understand" - I'm talking about the theory that all these religious nuts are propounding. Your definition of God is one where God has to hide in the dark corners where science hasn't shined a bright enough light yet...OK - whatever does it for you - but that's not the theory of the omnipotent being that the Bible talks about.
"Can he heat a pop-tart so much that he himself can not pick it up? Therefore, there is no God. Case closed."
Yes, he can - but if he changes his mind and decides to pick it up anyway - then that's OK too!
It's hard to imagine anything that's more personally sensitive than SWIFT banking transactions - and they gave those records up to the US government in no time flat!
These days you have to assume that any item of data you give to anyone is insecure from that point on.
Didn't Slashdot run a story a while back about a supermarket fingerprint pay
_ defeat_fingerprint_sensors/
system that was tried a year or so ago? It could be faked out REALLY easily
using a Gummibear.
I can't find the slashdot story - but check this out for example:
http://www.theregister.com/2002/05/16/gummi_bears
Does this new gizmo do something magical to avoid this rather easy attack?
Just google gummibear and fingerprint and you'll find a gazillion How To
articles.
If the biometrics guys are 'a bit puzzled by customer privacy fears" then
they are horribly ill-informed!
I can avoid leaving my credit card lying around for someone to steal - but
it's very hard indeed to avoid leaving my fingerprints in all sorts of
public places. If I could find out how to defeat their scanner so easily
with about 10 seconds of Googling - you can be very sure that the bad guys
will be lining up.
I'm not against the money grab. Someone has to pay for whatever functions these taxes cover - and taxing communications is as reasonable as most of the other things that are taxed.
The problem is that this is a fuzzy definition. Taxing telephones made sense when they were single function devices for carrying realtime analog voice from A to B. When Fax machines appeared, it still made sense - when dialup modems showed up it made sense because all data was taxed uniformly.
This new thing makes no sense - if you send a picture by connecting your fax machine to VOIP then you are taxed. If you email the same picture, you aren't. If you phone someone up using VOIP and get their voicemail, you leave a recording of your voice and are taxed for doing it. But if you email them a WAV file containing that exact same recording - no tax.
These distinctions will become more and more tricky to separate out.
If I play Battlefield II online - I can chat with other players - no tax. If I call them up using Vonage - tax.
If I want to save money, I should chat with my Mom via Battlefield II.
Then there is software like Ventrilo - end to end VOIP with no service provider involved. How can that be taxed?
This all makes no sense at all. You either have to tax all communications or none of it because it's nonsensical to talk about only taxing bytes which happen to contain realtime acoustic pressures.
This is just a way for lawyers to make big money.
So what about audio chat inside online computer games? I can talk to other players in - how is that different from telephony?
If I'm taxed for talking to someone using VOIP but not when I happen to be playing a game at the time - then maybe VOIP providers should include a copy of PONG that you can play with the other person while you talk to them?
The idea that you can tax bytes that contain the human voice in realtime - but you don't tax bytes that contain pictures, or human voice that was recorded a few hours ago...of all the millions of uses for data sent over the Internet - why should realtime human voice be singled out as special. It's just silly.
We either need to tax ALL data transfers over shared communications links or NONE of them. Repeal the tax on telephony or tax broadband the same way you tax dialled telephony - there is no practical difference.
Hmmm - so if I use dialup to connect to the Internet - and then use VOIP - do I get taxed twice? I think that's probably illegal.
The lawyers will make a fortune arguing this one.
"There are plenty of concrete predictions made in bible, unfortunately people didn't believe them until they happened so they didn't promote them. Now that they have happened they are nothing new."
... Thats one prediction that has happened. Unfortunately for us all God didn't put dates in which the predictions would come true."
You aren't thinking big enough. The bible says that there are NO LIMITS on God's power. So - if you believe in the theory of God - then you know that God has the power to fake the bible, fake those things it predicted, change your memory to only make you believe that you read those things (or that they happened). You know nothing for sure.
So - I can't possibly convince you that the God theory is false - there is absolutely no way for me to do that - and indeed it might quite possibly be true.
I don't use the God theory (which is a way of saying that I don't believe in God) - but that's not because I can't prove it - or because I've found some amazing proof of his non-existance. It's simply not a useful theory...it brings no predictions that I can use.
Occams razor say I should ignore it...along with the theory of little green aliens...along with an infinite number of possible theories that predict nothing and are non-falsifiable.
"First thing is that Jews will be scattered, and in the final days they will be gathered around the earth back to israel and all nations between ethiopia and persia will go together a war against Israel
Well, if you DON'T include the God theory as an axiom in the system, then you can write this off as a misreading, a mistranslation, a coincidence...there are lots of ways for science to show that this is not convinving proof of anything. I'm pretty sure you could find a good number of predictions the bible makes that didn't come true too - but God might have put them there to test our faith (just like all those dinosaur fossils).
Not falsifiable==Not useful.
No testable predictions==Not useful.
"There is another point, while the God theory isn't good alone.
Lets consider a bible theory, I have one question. If right now, someone would make complete bull shit stories about soviet union, inside todays russia. Would they A) be laughted off as totally false. B) believed by people.
Its just that the new testament was written off a public figure in a time when people who lived through its happenings. The it would of been bullshitting the movement that was called christianity after wards wouldn't of survived its first few decades.
These are few points made by an ex-atheist historian who tried to falsify bible based on historical context, he failed and became christian."
YIKES! Failure to falsify isn't the same as "prove".
I claim (and I'm going to write it down in this little book that I'll call "The Bibble") that you, personally have a large purple dinosaur following you around wherever you go. The dinosaur (his name is "Eric") has just one power - he can change the firing potential of the neurons of any human within 10 feet of His Scaley Presence. This means that you can't see him (and even if you could - he'd erase your memory of him). People who stand 20' away can see him easily - but you don't hear us telling you about him.
There is absolutely no way for you to disprove the Bibble. For you, it's unfalsifiable.
Do you believe in Eric? By your criteria, you should. You can't falsify it...it's impossible because everything you know might have been changed by Eric's ability to rewrite your brain. You should immediately give up your non-Eric-believing stance and become an Ericist fanatic from this moment on.
Eric's powers are a LOT more limited than God's - there are lots of things Eric can't do - but he's unfalsifiable - so you MUST believe in him if you believe in God.
Copies of the Bibble are available on request.
"Nazareth and several other towns alleged to have existed during the alleged life of Jesus have been demonstrated not to have existed during the period 0 to 50 of the Common Era."
But that's the problem with the existance of God as a scientific theory. We have PLENTY of solid scientific evidence of evolution and the origins of the universe tracked back to the first few femtoseconds - but these (along with the problems with those towns not existing back then) are useless in falsifying the God-theory because God can do absolutely anything at all. Hence, just as he might have faked all the evidence of evolution and the big-bang in order to test our faith, he might have faked the evidence that those towns didn't exist - or he might have rewritten all of those bibles last week and adjusted your memory to make you believe you've known about them all your life.
You see an omnipotent being simply makes ALL assumptions utterly invalid. It's like being inside The Matrix - nothing you think you know - nothing you can reason about - nothing you can find, measure, hold in your hand...absolutely nothing is knowable if you try to include the 'God theory' into your science.
So we have a choice: Either include God as an axiom - and give up thinking because it's pointless...or simply exclude the God theory and get on with making those Jet Packs.
The only way to admit a God theory into science is to have a God theory in which there is at least one teeny-tiny thing that God Can't Do. If there was something, we could concieve of a test that would falsify his existance and start to plan experiments that would allow us to test that. We could maybe even use that one teeny-tiny *fact* to build a useful existance. But when absolutely nothing is knowable for sure - because an utterly omnipotent being can change everything - we might as well curl up into a ball and wait for the rapture (unless God faked the evidence for that too).
I don't understand religious people at all.