It forces you to come up with something insightful, witty or at least remotely funny to some arbitrary subject, not something you can pick. That's too easy.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that's exactly how blogs behave - in both cases, someone posts an article on a subject of their choosing, and people comment on that "arbitrary" subject.
If the definition of blog is wide enough to include standalone opinion pieces, blogs with comments, and online journals, it certainly includes Slashdot - the only distinction being more than one person posts the articles.
So being able to give a probability of its outcome using some calculations is some sort of "complete understanding". I suppose then, that you have your own interpretation of exactly _why_ light does what it does during the double-slit?
Firstly, you're assuming there is a reason why light behaves that way. More generally, you're missing the point about the interpretations.
My understanding is that the various interpretations cannot be experimentally tested - they're philosophy, not science. It's like talking about the aether, or arguing how many angels fit on a pinhead.
Consider, when Newton developed his theory of gravity, we had no idea what a force actually was. But that doesn't mean that someone's idea that it's caused by little flying pixies pushing has any merit; the behaviour is well understood, and there is no evidence to suggest that these pixies exist, even though there might be "room" for them to exist in the theory. Now we do have theories which suggest what forces are, but there is only a point to these theories because what they say can be tested.
which aren't complete understandings but rather theories that haven't been disproven yet.
All theories are theories because they haven't been disproven yet. By that logic, complete understanding doesn't exist.
But no one has a testable way of distinguishing between QM interpretations, that somehow suggests evidence for telepathy.
Does one currently need to be convicted of something for an ASBO? The most worrying thing here is that people can receive them without being convicted, and the level of evidence required is that required by civil courts, so the burden of proof is lighter than criminal courts.
Wikipedia says "Although these are civil orders, the behaviour complained of must be proved to the criminal standard", but I can't find any reference for that, and it's disputed in the Discussion page.
As well as the distinction about it being testable, there is also the point that the idea of telepathy has come from anecdotal evidence. I don't think it's unreasonable that scientists investigate anecdotal evidence to see if there is anything to it (though I would ask why this particular study is different to the many studies that have already been conducted, and wonder why it's worth spending yet more money).
But with ID, it's hard to see how the idea could have come from some actual evidence - whilst most cultures have creationist myths, it's hard to see how they could have known how life as we see it today came about. These are just myths, and ID just comes from those myths.
On a similar note, I don't have a problem with tax money being spent on prayer studies (within reason), whilst I would object to ID studies.
And how do you propose to do this for GOD? Scientifically speaking, 90% of the known world's population believe in some higher being. Are you suggesting that it can't be tested for hence it doesn't exists and therefore claim that 90% of the world's population is deluded? I know this is completely off-topic but it is a valid response to your statement.
Whilst I would agree that there could be something which exists but is unproveable (an unfalsifiable hypothesis), note that most of those 90% (I'd dispute it's that high actually, but I agree it's >50%) believe in an interventionist God - consider things such as prayer. If these things exist, they are testable (and indeed, some experiments have tried to test this).
Your argument doesn't hold up properly. It also indicates that you can't love... How do you prove love? I feel, sense and experience (like telepathy) it, but I can not PROVE love
What specifically do you mean by "love"? Of course we can prove emotions - firstly we can ask people, and consider it more likely that there isn't some global conspiracy where everyone makes up this feeling. Secondly you could compare it to their behaviour at times they say they feel specific things (and yes, hence things like buying flowers do count, if it's part of a properly designed experiment - such things constitute evidence). Thirdly maybe there are some brain readings it could be compared to.
I never understand this argument that "believing in love" means that I'm believing in something without evidence - of course there is evidence.
That is all well and good (and I am in support doing just these things) but let's not act like a horrible travesty has taken place. People also need to be made aware of what can happen when you agree to TOS that states that anything you upload to a service becomes their property.
Again, the TOS is irrelevant here. If the story was that Facebook chose to give away some information, you might have a point. The problem is that two private entities were privately sharing data (i.e., a user having information privately stored by facebook), and the Government has forced them to hand this data to a 3rd party. That is the travesty.
Is what facebook did kinda sucky? Yes,
Did anyone say Facebook were sucky? The culprits are the guys who wanted this information, and the US Government.
And it's not exactly fair to claim 350 million, if it requires you to download a new client - is everyone going to upgrade overnight?
By that logic, clients like Gaim or Trillian, or using Jabber with transports, already have the largest community, with 350 million plus however many AIM users there are.
If someone makes petty criticisms at Wikipedia, it's fair game to make petty criticisms back at them.
More generally though - yes Wikipedia can sometimes have mistakes, and may have some bias, and it might be reasonable to say it's not as good as say Britannica. However, when you're comparing it to the level of misinformation and bias that floods out of news organisations (Reuters included), there's simply no comparison.
I wish people would read the news with the same level of scepticism so many have for Wikipedia.
They can decide to turn them all off tomorrow and you could not do shit about it.
Well, we could make people aware of it, and hopefully persuade people to stop using their service. Or to turn them against laws such as the USAPATRIOT act. Which is exactly is being done here.
If a company makes public things it said would be private, who cares "ooh it's their right to"; that doesn't mean users have to put up with it.
Also this isn't a case where Facebook decided to do it, it was another company using legal force. Hence, surely this would apply even if Facebook didn't have that in their TOS? Do you think it's good if we are unable to use the Internet for anything we wouldn't want everyone in the world to know, even if we password protected and/or encrypted the information?
And yes, if the Government passed a law "in order to fight terrorism" that allowed seizing your photo albums in your house, they'd have them too. Facebook's TOS is irrelevant here.
Good fucking response! Numbnuts like you are why large chunks of Wikipedia are a complete POV-ridden mess. Apprently, you missed the part about organized groups.
And I'm sure Wikipedia would be greatly improved by having editors such as yourself, who prefer insults to rational argument...
You missed the part about raising the issue with other editors.
3RR exists for a reason - without it, one person could push his POV, nevermind organised groups. Do you think that would be better?
It exists for other reasons too. Even editors who think their edits are good may sometimes be in the wrong. Wikipedia works by consensus, not by letting individuals like you push their personal POV.
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit -- if they are smart enough to figure out the wikitext syntax and have enough time on their hands.
Wikitext syntax? You hit edit and start typing. You don't need to use wikitext, you can leave that to those who do.
Yes, you need to know how to edit. You need to know how to use a computer. And how to read and write. And you need to have time to make the edit, because time machines don't exist.
But "Wikipedia, the encylopedia anyone who isn't an idiot can edit" doesn't have the same ring to it.
All the vandal fighting tools, like Lupin's Recent Changes, Vandalfighter (and its many derivatives and copycats) take this for granted.
If would be useful to automatically mark this on a page, for readers as well as editors as a warning (e.g., "This article has been recently edited", "This article is rapidly changing").
No it is no fault, but it is one reason why wikipedia is quoted so much.
Agreed, Wikipedia is not at fault.
Not random - they linked to some pages they found on google instead. Or they linked to no web page at all for certain expressions that are routinely linked to wikipedia now.
Not literally mathematically "random", by that I mean some webpage found on Google. So if your not saying that Wikipedia is worse than some other webpage, what are you saying? Why is this a problem?
For the record I like and use Wikipedia, but at the moment I would never bother looking up anything controvesial, or about modern politians or corporations because it is just too untrustworthy.
That's something I was thinking - it occurs to me that all of the criticisms of Wikipedia focus on up-to-date news events on controversial issues or people. So in the worst case if you decide it's useless for that, that doesn't affect its merit for all other areas. Indeed generally, I don't associate encylopedias with finding out about current news, I use them to learn about more general facts.
I don't know how often Brittanica gets printed - how much does that include about recent news events and how well does it cope?
The only other place to find out about recent events are news organisations, and despite Wikipedia's issues, it's simply nowhere near comparable to the level of bias and lies found in media (the worse thing being that people seem to trust media unquestionably, unlike Wikipedia).
Well-meaning editors quickly find themselves reported for vandalism, or 3 revert-rule violation by either groups of editors working together or sock-puppets that were set up months ago.
If you're outnumbered, then raise the issue with other editors. There are methods for doing this on Wikipedia.
I was outnumbered in one case by someone with probable sockpuppets. I raised the issue, and it only took a couple of editors to come over and sway things, and pretty quickly the problem editor found his reversions marked as vandalism.
And I don't see how a well-meaning editor will get reported for 3RR, unless he breaks it, in which case that's his fault.
The fact that is lost in many Wikipedia proponents is that, traditionally, it is a lot more expensive to put words to print and distribute it;
Like many arguments made against Wikipedia, this is a "Why I think it shouldn't work", but doesn't make any reference to studies on how well it actually does work in practice. Wikipedia is not at the planning stage, some hypothetical idea being bounced around; it's here and available, and it should be judged on the resultant content.
Your argument applies against all online sources of information. Even if inaccuracies are less likely to appear in a print encyclopedia, they will also remain for longer, due to being harder to remove, so it's not clear that overall the number of inaccuracies will be less.
1) you can get on a plane to Egypt, hire an army of workers and conduct your own search and examinations at the site,
2) At a regional rare-book library, you might be able to read the reports and papers of Abigail Q. Whorstenshire, who found the shrine in the 19th century and carried out the initial assays,
3) At a local university library, you can read the subsequent analysis of (2) by third parties, or even more up to date data from the site,
4) At your local city library, you can read summaries of the above in the latest editions of the peer-reviewed and fully referenced Encylopedia Erratica,
4) You can go to Wikipedia, where random pimply-faced fuckwits invent any manner of nonsense on a daily basis, complete with "citations" and offer it to the world at large as the truth.
Allow me to edit that for you:
You can go to Wikipedia, where information from various sources is included, with references on where to find more information.
I mean, how do you know which sources to go looking for in the first place? Since Britannica may contain errors also, you'd better be prepared to go looking for experts on the matter and primary sources (assuming again you magically know where they are).
Geez, am I the only one who sees this? The services I read about allowed you to BUY AN ORIGINAL COPY of the movie, and then because you also opted to PAY for their services they would MAKE you an edited copy while sometimes preserving and returning the untouched original. The decision that it's not OK for a service to make a copy to suit a customer's needs in that case is another step towards "licensing" content instead of OWNING it.
I would say the difference is that this is still commercial - they are still selling an edited version of the film, even though they require you to buy the original.
I believe people should have the right to edit a copy for their own personal use. But personal use doesn't include selling it on.
So what's the first thing you see when you hit her page? "This article may not conform to the neutral point of view policy. A Wikipedian has nominated this article to be checked for its neutrality." Which is all well a good (considering a sizeable number of us probably agree with the content), but how often do you suppose that happens?
Isn't it good that Wikipedia openly admits when there is a POV problem, compared with "authoritative" sources which will do everything they can to deny any bias?
Or worse, that it will be so common in the future as to be considered the norm.
The problem is that Wikipedia is quoted as if it was a perfect source
No it isn't.
No college student should quote the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a scientific paper, but they quote the Wikipedia.
So what, that's Wikipedia's fault for being free?
Every blogger links routinely to wikipedia articles, because it is so easy.
And what were they linking to before Wikipedia existed - the free online version of Encyclopedia Britannica? Of course not - it was random webpages. Which brings me to the next point:
Wikipedia contents are the first result on Google, MSN and every other search engine. And no one puts this sign on these references.
It's one thing to compare Wikipedia to paid-for encyclopedias, but are you seriously saying that Wikipedia compares poorly to the random webpages that used to get top hits?
Trying to find an article to link before Wikipedia came along was a nightmare - you'd have to trawl through irrelevant pages, and any pages would be far far less likely to cite references, and being usually just one person's opinion, not open to debate, they would be far far likely to contain bias.
Maybe... but I'm not sure it's about fanboyism so much. Opera isn't Open Source. Until recently (version 8.5, I believe), it was ad supported.
I don't know if Open Source is the issue - look how popular Mac OS X is, and in very much the same way as Firefox: comments not in favour get modded down, whilst flamebait against other niche alternatives get modded up - as you say, they think it's great and can't see what anything else could possibly offer. Yet I'd like to see the reaction if I posted to Mac OS articles saying I won't use it unless the open source it.
So, Opera should follow some rule someone invented, instead of being easier to use?
Wait, isn't that what you're asking? You want it to follow the rule IE invented, instead of being easier to use.
At the least, I don't see how pressing down instead of tab is harder, and this has the advantage that I can still use tab to switch to the next UI control (is there a way to do that in IE/Firefox?)
I think it's a bad idea to have to duplicate IE's behaviour just for the sake of it. And elsewhere people have been criticising Opera for not following UI standards (though they fail to explain what), so either way, it can't win. If Firefox followed a standard and did things better, but Opera did things the IE way, there'd be people saying Firefox was better, and laughing at the suggestion it's better to be like IE.
Ok. Here is a start, W3 Schools hits. You'll notice that opera is not popular among people who learn about making websites. This is just one website, but they are more likely to have alternate browser hits than some.
And which browser comes out top?
Since people don't use opera, I'm concluding they don't like opera or don't know about opera. Either way, opera has not been successful. Firefox, in constrast, has been successful. Many people have heard of it. Both of my parents have tried it. I called them and asked if they have ever heard of opera. Neither of them had.
And did you suggest they try installing it?
The reason is that the fan-boy Firefox pushing does wonders for getting people to try that. And I fully agree - it is a good thing that due to Firefox, people have been motivated to get people to switch from IE.
However, it is absurd to suggest that this act suddenly makes Opera installations worse or break in anyway. Consider - at one point Opera was the only decent alternative to IE, so the argument that it's because Firefox is better doesn't apply. People were happily using Opera, and they weren't obsessed with getting everyone else to switch.
Slashdot Mirror
It forces you to come up with something insightful, witty or at least remotely funny to some arbitrary subject, not something you can pick. That's too easy.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that's exactly how blogs behave - in both cases, someone posts an article on a subject of their choosing, and people comment on that "arbitrary" subject.
If the definition of blog is wide enough to include standalone opinion pieces, blogs with comments, and online journals, it certainly includes Slashdot - the only distinction being more than one person posts the articles.
So being able to give a probability of its outcome using some calculations is some sort of "complete understanding". I suppose then, that you have your own interpretation of exactly _why_ light does what it does during the double-slit?
Firstly, you're assuming there is a reason why light behaves that way. More generally, you're missing the point about the interpretations.
My understanding is that the various interpretations cannot be experimentally tested - they're philosophy, not science. It's like talking about the aether, or arguing how many angels fit on a pinhead.
Consider, when Newton developed his theory of gravity, we had no idea what a force actually was. But that doesn't mean that someone's idea that it's caused by little flying pixies pushing has any merit; the behaviour is well understood, and there is no evidence to suggest that these pixies exist, even though there might be "room" for them to exist in the theory. Now we do have theories which suggest what forces are, but there is only a point to these theories because what they say can be tested.
which aren't complete understandings but rather theories that haven't been disproven yet.
All theories are theories because they haven't been disproven yet. By that logic, complete understanding doesn't exist.
But no one has a testable way of distinguishing between QM interpretations, that somehow suggests evidence for telepathy.
Does one currently need to be convicted of something for an ASBO? The most worrying thing here is that people can receive them without being convicted, and the level of evidence required is that required by civil courts, so the burden of proof is lighter than criminal courts.
Wikipedia says "Although these are civil orders, the behaviour complained of must be proved to the criminal standard", but I can't find any reference for that, and it's disputed in the Discussion page.
As well as the distinction about it being testable, there is also the point that the idea of telepathy has come from anecdotal evidence. I don't think it's unreasonable that scientists investigate anecdotal evidence to see if there is anything to it (though I would ask why this particular study is different to the many studies that have already been conducted, and wonder why it's worth spending yet more money).
But with ID, it's hard to see how the idea could have come from some actual evidence - whilst most cultures have creationist myths, it's hard to see how they could have known how life as we see it today came about. These are just myths, and ID just comes from those myths.
On a similar note, I don't have a problem with tax money being spent on prayer studies (within reason), whilst I would object to ID studies.
And how do you propose to do this for GOD? Scientifically speaking, 90% of the known world's population believe in some higher being. Are you suggesting that it can't be tested for hence it doesn't exists and therefore claim that 90% of the world's population is deluded? I know this is completely off-topic but it is a valid response to your statement.
Whilst I would agree that there could be something which exists but is unproveable (an unfalsifiable hypothesis), note that most of those 90% (I'd dispute it's that high actually, but I agree it's >50%) believe in an interventionist God - consider things such as prayer. If these things exist, they are testable (and indeed, some experiments have tried to test this).
Your argument doesn't hold up properly. It also indicates that you can't love... How do you prove love? I feel, sense and experience (like telepathy) it, but I can not PROVE love
What specifically do you mean by "love"? Of course we can prove emotions - firstly we can ask people, and consider it more likely that there isn't some global conspiracy where everyone makes up this feeling. Secondly you could compare it to their behaviour at times they say they feel specific things (and yes, hence things like buying flowers do count, if it's part of a properly designed experiment - such things constitute evidence). Thirdly maybe there are some brain readings it could be compared to.
I never understand this argument that "believing in love" means that I'm believing in something without evidence - of course there is evidence.
A year late and a character short.
We already know that, it was covered in the article. But by this logic, Linux was 7 years late, and doesn't deserve a mention either.
That is all well and good (and I am in support doing just these things) but let's not act like a horrible travesty has taken place. People also need to be made aware of what can happen when you agree to TOS that states that anything you upload to a service becomes their property.
Again, the TOS is irrelevant here. If the story was that Facebook chose to give away some information, you might have a point. The problem is that two private entities were privately sharing data (i.e., a user having information privately stored by facebook), and the Government has forced them to hand this data to a 3rd party. That is the travesty.
Is what facebook did kinda sucky? Yes,
Did anyone say Facebook were sucky? The culprits are the guys who wanted this information, and the US Government.
And it's not exactly fair to claim 350 million, if it requires you to download a new client - is everyone going to upgrade overnight?
By that logic, clients like Gaim or Trillian, or using Jabber with transports, already have the largest community, with 350 million plus however many AIM users there are.
If someone makes petty criticisms at Wikipedia, it's fair game to make petty criticisms back at them.
More generally though - yes Wikipedia can sometimes have mistakes, and may have some bias, and it might be reasonable to say it's not as good as say Britannica. However, when you're comparing it to the level of misinformation and bias that floods out of news organisations (Reuters included), there's simply no comparison.
I wish people would read the news with the same level of scepticism so many have for Wikipedia.
They can decide to turn them all off tomorrow and you could not do shit about it.
Well, we could make people aware of it, and hopefully persuade people to stop using their service. Or to turn them against laws such as the USAPATRIOT act. Which is exactly is being done here.
If a company makes public things it said would be private, who cares "ooh it's their right to"; that doesn't mean users have to put up with it.
Also this isn't a case where Facebook decided to do it, it was another company using legal force. Hence, surely this would apply even if Facebook didn't have that in their TOS? Do you think it's good if we are unable to use the Internet for anything we wouldn't want everyone in the world to know, even if we password protected and/or encrypted the information?
And yes, if the Government passed a law "in order to fight terrorism" that allowed seizing your photo albums in your house, they'd have them too. Facebook's TOS is irrelevant here.
Good fucking response! Numbnuts like you are why large chunks of Wikipedia are a complete POV-ridden mess. Apprently, you missed the part about organized groups.
And I'm sure Wikipedia would be greatly improved by having editors such as yourself, who prefer insults to rational argument...
You missed the part about raising the issue with other editors.
3RR exists for a reason - without it, one person could push his POV, nevermind organised groups. Do you think that would be better?
It exists for other reasons too. Even editors who think their edits are good may sometimes be in the wrong. Wikipedia works by consensus, not by letting individuals like you push their personal POV.
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit -- if they are smart enough to figure out the wikitext syntax and have enough time on their hands.
Wikitext syntax? You hit edit and start typing. You don't need to use wikitext, you can leave that to those who do.
Yes, you need to know how to edit. You need to know how to use a computer. And how to read and write. And you need to have time to make the edit, because time machines don't exist.
But "Wikipedia, the encylopedia anyone who isn't an idiot can edit" doesn't have the same ring to it.
"Highlighting fresh edits."
All the vandal fighting tools, like Lupin's Recent Changes, Vandalfighter (and its many derivatives and copycats) take this for granted.
If would be useful to automatically mark this on a page, for readers as well as editors as a warning (e.g., "This article has been recently edited", "This article is rapidly changing").
No it is no fault, but it is one reason why wikipedia is quoted so much.
Agreed, Wikipedia is not at fault.
Not random - they linked to some pages they found on google instead. Or they linked to no web page at all for certain expressions that are routinely linked to wikipedia now.
Not literally mathematically "random", by that I mean some webpage found on Google. So if your not saying that Wikipedia is worse than some other webpage, what are you saying? Why is this a problem?
For the record I like and use Wikipedia, but at the moment I would never bother looking up anything controvesial, or about modern politians or corporations because it is just too untrustworthy.
That's something I was thinking - it occurs to me that all of the criticisms of Wikipedia focus on up-to-date news events on controversial issues or people. So in the worst case if you decide it's useless for that, that doesn't affect its merit for all other areas. Indeed generally, I don't associate encylopedias with finding out about current news, I use them to learn about more general facts.
I don't know how often Brittanica gets printed - how much does that include about recent news events and how well does it cope?
The only other place to find out about recent events are news organisations, and despite Wikipedia's issues, it's simply nowhere near comparable to the level of bias and lies found in media (the worse thing being that people seem to trust media unquestionably, unlike Wikipedia).
Well-meaning editors quickly find themselves reported for vandalism, or 3 revert-rule violation by either groups of editors working together or sock-puppets that were set up months ago.
If you're outnumbered, then raise the issue with other editors. There are methods for doing this on Wikipedia.
I was outnumbered in one case by someone with probable sockpuppets. I raised the issue, and it only took a couple of editors to come over and sway things, and pretty quickly the problem editor found his reversions marked as vandalism.
And I don't see how a well-meaning editor will get reported for 3RR, unless he breaks it, in which case that's his fault.
There aren't only 3 reasons not to upgrade from Windows 98.
So give us a reason why someone has upgraded from Win98, but will make them likely to buy a Mac as a result of Win98 support ending.
The fact that is lost in many Wikipedia proponents is that, traditionally, it is a lot more expensive to put words to print and distribute it;
Like many arguments made against Wikipedia, this is a "Why I think it shouldn't work", but doesn't make any reference to studies on how well it actually does work in practice. Wikipedia is not at the planning stage, some hypothetical idea being bounced around; it's here and available, and it should be judged on the resultant content.
Your argument applies against all online sources of information. Even if inaccuracies are less likely to appear in a print encyclopedia, they will also remain for longer, due to being harder to remove, so it's not clear that overall the number of inaccuracies will be less.
1) you can get on a plane to Egypt, hire an army of workers and conduct your own search and examinations at the site,
2) At a regional rare-book library, you might be able to read the reports and papers of Abigail Q. Whorstenshire, who found the shrine in the 19th century and carried out the initial assays,
3) At a local university library, you can read the subsequent analysis of (2) by third parties, or even more up to date data from the site,
4) At your local city library, you can read summaries of the above in the latest editions of the peer-reviewed and fully referenced Encylopedia Erratica,
4) You can go to Wikipedia, where random pimply-faced fuckwits invent any manner of nonsense on a daily basis, complete with "citations" and offer it to the world at large as the truth.
Allow me to edit that for you:
You can go to Wikipedia, where information from various sources is included, with references on where to find more information.
I mean, how do you know which sources to go looking for in the first place? Since Britannica may contain errors also, you'd better be prepared to go looking for experts on the matter and primary sources (assuming again you magically know where they are).
Geez, am I the only one who sees this? The services I read about allowed you to BUY AN ORIGINAL COPY of the movie, and then because you also opted to PAY for their services they would MAKE you an edited copy while sometimes preserving and returning the untouched original. The decision that it's not OK for a service to make a copy to suit a customer's needs in that case is another step towards "licensing" content instead of OWNING it.
I would say the difference is that this is still commercial - they are still selling an edited version of the film, even though they require you to buy the original.
I believe people should have the right to edit a copy for their own personal use. But personal use doesn't include selling it on.
So what's the first thing you see when you hit her page? "This article may not conform to the neutral point of view policy. A Wikipedian has nominated this article to be checked for its neutrality."
Which is all well a good (considering a sizeable number of us probably agree with the content), but how often do you suppose that happens?
Isn't it good that Wikipedia openly admits when there is a POV problem, compared with "authoritative" sources which will do everything they can to deny any bias?
Or worse, that it will be so common in the future as to be considered the norm.
Pure speculation.
The problem is that Wikipedia is quoted as if it was a perfect source
No it isn't.
No college student should quote the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a scientific paper, but they quote the Wikipedia.
So what, that's Wikipedia's fault for being free?
Every blogger links routinely to wikipedia articles, because it is so easy.
And what were they linking to before Wikipedia existed - the free online version of Encyclopedia Britannica? Of course not - it was random webpages. Which brings me to the next point:
Wikipedia contents are the first result on Google, MSN and every other search engine. And no one puts this sign on these references.
It's one thing to compare Wikipedia to paid-for encyclopedias, but are you seriously saying that Wikipedia compares poorly to the random webpages that used to get top hits?
Trying to find an article to link before Wikipedia came along was a nightmare - you'd have to trawl through irrelevant pages, and any pages would be far far less likely to cite references, and being usually just one person's opinion, not open to debate, they would be far far likely to contain bias.
Maybe... but I'm not sure it's about fanboyism so much. Opera isn't Open Source. Until recently (version 8.5, I believe), it was ad supported.
I don't know if Open Source is the issue - look how popular Mac OS X is, and in very much the same way as Firefox: comments not in favour get modded down, whilst flamebait against other niche alternatives get modded up - as you say, they think it's great and can't see what anything else could possibly offer. Yet I'd like to see the reaction if I posted to Mac OS articles saying I won't use it unless the open source it.
So, Opera should follow some rule someone invented, instead of being easier to use?
Wait, isn't that what you're asking? You want it to follow the rule IE invented, instead of being easier to use.
At the least, I don't see how pressing down instead of tab is harder, and this has the advantage that I can still use tab to switch to the next UI control (is there a way to do that in IE/Firefox?)
I think it's a bad idea to have to duplicate IE's behaviour just for the sake of it. And elsewhere people have been criticising Opera for not following UI standards (though they fail to explain what), so either way, it can't win. If Firefox followed a standard and did things better, but Opera did things the IE way, there'd be people saying Firefox was better, and laughing at the suggestion it's better to be like IE.
Ok. Here is a start, W3 Schools hits. You'll notice that opera is not popular among people who learn about making websites. This is just one website, but they are more likely to have alternate browser hits than some.
And which browser comes out top?
Since people don't use opera, I'm concluding they don't like opera or don't know about opera. Either way, opera has not been successful. Firefox, in constrast, has been successful. Many people have heard of it. Both of my parents have tried it. I called them and asked if they have ever heard of opera. Neither of them had.
And did you suggest they try installing it?
The reason is that the fan-boy Firefox pushing does wonders for getting people to try that. And I fully agree - it is a good thing that due to Firefox, people have been motivated to get people to switch from IE.
However, it is absurd to suggest that this act suddenly makes Opera installations worse or break in anyway. Consider - at one point Opera was the only decent alternative to IE, so the argument that it's because Firefox is better doesn't apply. People were happily using Opera, and they weren't obsessed with getting everyone else to switch.