Nothing's perfect. If you want a good understanding of a complex mathematical term... take a course in mathematics. I think Wikipedia does a wonderful job of being concise. One can't really ask for more.
I've been an admin on Wikipedia for three years now, and I'm quite well-versed in writing articles.
I've been reading this line over and over, along with your other statements; and I just can't make the two jibe. Why are you an admin, in light of your criticisms?
Wikipedia is a living document. It cannot be perfect now or ever, but it is always getting better. What more can we ask for?
As I quoted it, the Wikipedia article says the article originated in the 1500s by a Croatian. Not every word is faithful to its etymology. You even say so. So WTF?
And no, I wasn't trying to correct you or explain your mistake. I was just trying to show you that your statement could have been better informed by doing a bit of research in Wikipedia before saying "correct me if I'm wrong."
More to the point, if you think you know better... why not fix the article? You obviously have enough free time to post misleading statements on/.; why not be constructive instead?
But if I want to edit Residue class-wise affine groups, I have no fucking clue where to begin in order to explain the concept in layman's terms.
That doesn't make sense. Some math subjects are esoteric. There is no way one can explain it simply without first explaining five years' worth of math theory. No way. If you want a simplistic article on an esoteric subject, you are asking the article to be 500 pages long. That would simply be redundant.
Just think how utterly absurd that is: engaging in a research project simply to understand an encyclopedia article? It defeats the entire purpose of having an encyclopedia in the first place.
Again, I completely disagree. I find this exact process to be the best learning experience I have had. I have edited hundreds of Wikipedia articles about things I did not know much about. I start reading the article, and as I come across things that don't make sense to my level of understanding, I change them. Sometimes this requires that I do a good deal of research to be able to make that edit. So it may take me a whole hour to edit a 2-page article. This is an awesome way to learn. By the time I am done, I have a tremendous understanding of the subject... and I have helped the next person get a good understanding much more quickly. Everybody wins.
Try it sometime. It may take you an hour or two (hint: most Wikipedia articles have an "External links" section that is tremendously helpful), but you will find that you have expanded your understanding enormously. Isn't that the highest goal of an encyclopedia?
Yes, it's easier to criticize than to help. But helping out Wikipedia is much more useful than complaining about it.
One does not in any way need a deep grounding in a subject to be able to write a brief description of what that subject is. It just takes a little work.
This is not in any way comparable to writing new code. One has to be a good programmer to fix OSS. One does not need to be a scientist to fix an article about a scientific subject. I have contributed a lot to the Marine Biology article on Wikipedia, even though I am not a biologist. I can't write the whole article, but in just a few minutes I can figure out enough to make the article more accessible to the layperson.
And as someone notes below, Wikipedia is a living document. Over time, these sorts of things will work themselves out. Just complaining about it doesn't do much (except perhaps motivate others). In a short period of time you can at least learn how to do this: 1. Click the Edit button on the top of the page 2. Place this code at the very beginning, followed by a carriage return: {{cleanup}} 3. Click the preview button and see that the cleanup box appears at the top 4. Click the submit button
This tells the community that this page needs cleanup. There. You've contributed, and it took you 20 seconds.
For some things, you just can't explain the concept without assuming a certain level of understanding.
Do you know what an adequate pointclass is? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequate_pointclass I don't, and the article doesn't help me understand it. That's because I don't have a Masters in mathematics. I would fully expect that if I studied math fort a couple of years, I would be able to understand what an adequate pointclass is by reading that stub article. But how could someone tell me what it is if I don't have that context? And why would they?
There are limits to how much one article can explain. Otherwise each article would begin with basic lessons on English and work up through the entirety of human understanding until they finally get to the subject at hand.
You are right about how Wikipedia articles should be constructed; and the general consensus of Wikipedians is the same.
So... if you find something wrong... FIX IT. That's the point of Wikipedia.
And, yes, you certainly can fix articles you are unfamiliar with. It takes a little work and a little reading of the conveniently-provided external links, but it is really not difficult at all to learn enough about any subject to be able to provide a 1-2 sentence description of what it is. I do it all the time. I've even written whole stub articles about subjects I didn't even know existed. (And they seem to be written correctly, as future editors have left most of my verbiage in place.)
The word encyclopedia comes from the Classical Greek "(munged)" (pronounced "enkyklia paideia"), literally, a "[well-]rounded education," meaning "a general knowledge." Though the notion of a compendium of knowledge dates back thousands of years, the term was first used in 1541 in the title of a book by Joachimus Fortius Ringelbergius, Lucubrationes vel potius absolutissima kyklopaideia (Basel, 1541).
It is debatable if well-rounded means comprehensive or just general as opposed to specific.
The article claims that Wikipedia articles like the one on Epigenetics are not accessible to the layperson. But... what's going to cause someone to look that up? Wouldn't they already have some sort of context that leads them there?
I find that extremely accessible while not being dumbed down in any way. It in an enormously informative article, and leads one to wonder and thirst for more. That sounds like an awesome teaching tool to me.
In a well-written Wikipedia article, the big words are wikilinked. When one doesn't understand something, one clicks the links for further understanding.
This has always been the promise of hypertext, but it is only fully realized in Wikipedia. I couldn't agree less with the premise that Wikipedia is unaccessible.
Additionally, as the article notes, there is also Simple English Wikipedia. http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/ It doesn't have 1.7 million articles, but... of course not. There aren't that many concepts in "simple English."
Some people are sending huge graphics files and paying for badnwidth and/or sending to people with slow connectiuons, so they actually have a use for maximal compression.
I have to agree that for most people (myself included), compatibility is all that matters. I'm so glad Macs now can natively zip. But there are valid reasons to want compression over compatibility.
Not every software achieves maximum efficiency. It is perfectly imaginable that a compressor could be slow and bad. It is nice to see that these compressors did not suffer that fate.
In all of your scenarios, you're not incorporating the impact of harvesting the power. What would it take, physically, to harvest the world's demand of power using tidal forces, even assuming extreme efficiency? Don't you think those collectors would have some effect on the inhabitants of the ocean?
If we had so many wind turbines that we were collecting enough power to run the world, would that not have some effect on the global wind patterns?
Also solar power cools the Earth's surface. Solar farms are envisioned as acres and acres of panels in the desert. That would turn a very hot spot into a very cold spot, changing the currents there, and thus affecting overall temperature distribution (ie, the wind).
Same sort of thing goes for tidal energy. If you collect enough, you are going to affect life in the ocean. There just ain't no free ride.
But there are two viable solutions:
Solar panels in space, not in orbit around the Earth. But this has the little problem of getting the power to the Earth. Even if we can beam it... that is just asking for trouble.
Radical Idea: Use less energy. But who's gonna make money off that? Yuck!
There was a Monty Python episode where they were comparing penguin brains to human brains. They found that if the penguin were scaled up to human size, its brain was still smaller than a human brain. But -- and this is the important part -- it's larger than it was before!
I don't really like the idea of people being able to remotely look at my screen. You may as well just put video cameras behind everyone and remind people that "we can switch to your camera at any time". Just because technology makes snooping easier, it doesn't mean we should take advantage of it.
VNC saves my butt all day long. Instead of schlepping to every computer every time there is a problem, I simply say, "OK, I'm going to look in on your screen now," double-click their name (Apple Remote Desktop is da bomb, in this respect), and take it from there. And no, that's not just me being lazy; it is me being more efficient. I can do more work in a day because of VNC.
And as an interesting aside, my company is all-Mac. All of our new laptops have cameras built right into them. So I have a camera pointing not at their screen, but at their face! To be fair, Apple ties the power to the camera to a LED, so they can tell if the camera is on... and I don't have off-the-shelf tools to hook into that camera, but... it is there. Weird, eh?
To be honest, I'm not sure that privacy and the future are compatible. I have yet to see someone prove to me that privacy can be maintained by other than artificial (ie, legal... and therefore transient) means.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing's perfect. If you want a good understanding of a complex mathematical term... take a course in mathematics. I think Wikipedia does a wonderful job of being concise. One can't really ask for more.
s _bookshelf (a sister project of Wikipedia).
Well... to be fair: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Mathematic
I've been an admin on Wikipedia for three years now, and I'm quite well-versed in writing articles.
I've been reading this line over and over, along with your other statements; and I just can't make the two jibe. Why are you an admin, in light of your criticisms?
Wikipedia is a living document. It cannot be perfect now or ever, but it is always getting better. What more can we ask for?
As I quoted it, the Wikipedia article says the article originated in the 1500s by a Croatian. Not every word is faithful to its etymology. You even say so. So WTF?
/.; why not be constructive instead?
And no, I wasn't trying to correct you or explain your mistake. I was just trying to show you that your statement could have been better informed by doing a bit of research in Wikipedia before saying "correct me if I'm wrong."
More to the point, if you think you know better... why not fix the article? You obviously have enough free time to post misleading statements on
But if I want to edit Residue class-wise affine groups, I have no fucking clue where to begin in order to explain the concept in layman's terms.
That doesn't make sense. Some math subjects are esoteric. There is no way one can explain it simply without first explaining five years' worth of math theory. No way. If you want a simplistic article on an esoteric subject, you are asking the article to be 500 pages long. That would simply be redundant.
Just think how utterly absurd that is: engaging in a research project simply to understand an encyclopedia article? It defeats the entire purpose of having an encyclopedia in the first place.
Again, I completely disagree. I find this exact process to be the best learning experience I have had. I have edited hundreds of Wikipedia articles about things I did not know much about. I start reading the article, and as I come across things that don't make sense to my level of understanding, I change them. Sometimes this requires that I do a good deal of research to be able to make that edit. So it may take me a whole hour to edit a 2-page article. This is an awesome way to learn. By the time I am done, I have a tremendous understanding of the subject... and I have helped the next person get a good understanding much more quickly. Everybody wins.
Try it sometime. It may take you an hour or two (hint: most Wikipedia articles have an "External links" section that is tremendously helpful), but you will find that you have expanded your understanding enormously. Isn't that the highest goal of an encyclopedia?
Yes, it's easier to criticize than to help. But helping out Wikipedia is much more useful than complaining about it.
One does not in any way need a deep grounding in a subject to be able to write a brief description of what that subject is. It just takes a little work.
This is not in any way comparable to writing new code. One has to be a good programmer to fix OSS. One does not need to be a scientist to fix an article about a scientific subject. I have contributed a lot to the Marine Biology article on Wikipedia, even though I am not a biologist. I can't write the whole article, but in just a few minutes I can figure out enough to make the article more accessible to the layperson.
And as someone notes below, Wikipedia is a living document. Over time, these sorts of things will work themselves out. Just complaining about it doesn't do much (except perhaps motivate others). In a short period of time you can at least learn how to do this:
1. Click the Edit button on the top of the page
2. Place this code at the very beginning, followed by a carriage return: {{cleanup}}
3. Click the preview button and see that the cleanup box appears at the top
4. Click the submit button
This tells the community that this page needs cleanup. There. You've contributed, and it took you 20 seconds.
For some things, you just can't explain the concept without assuming a certain level of understanding.
Do you know what an adequate pointclass is?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequate_pointclass
I don't, and the article doesn't help me understand it. That's because I don't have a Masters in mathematics. I would fully expect that if I studied math fort a couple of years, I would be able to understand what an adequate pointclass is by reading that stub article. But how could someone tell me what it is if I don't have that context? And why would they?
There are limits to how much one article can explain. Otherwise each article would begin with basic lessons on English and work up through the entirety of human understanding until they finally get to the subject at hand.
You are right about how Wikipedia articles should be constructed; and the general consensus of Wikipedians is the same.
So... if you find something wrong... FIX IT. That's the point of Wikipedia.
And, yes, you certainly can fix articles you are unfamiliar with. It takes a little work and a little reading of the conveniently-provided external links, but it is really not difficult at all to learn enough about any subject to be able to provide a 1-2 sentence description of what it is. I do it all the time. I've even written whole stub articles about subjects I didn't even know existed. (And they seem to be written correctly, as future editors have left most of my verbiage in place.)
Once again, Wikipedia comes through.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia
The word encyclopedia comes from the Classical Greek "(munged)" (pronounced "enkyklia paideia"), literally, a "[well-]rounded education," meaning "a general knowledge." Though the notion of a compendium of knowledge dates back thousands of years, the term was first used in 1541 in the title of a book by Joachimus Fortius Ringelbergius, Lucubrationes vel potius absolutissima kyklopaideia (Basel, 1541).
It is debatable if well-rounded means comprehensive or just general as opposed to specific.
The article claims that Wikipedia articles like the one on Epigenetics are not accessible to the layperson. But... what's going to cause someone to look that up? Wouldn't they already have some sort of context that leads them there?
By comparison, look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant
I find that extremely accessible while not being dumbed down in any way. It in an enormously informative article, and leads one to wonder and thirst for more. That sounds like an awesome teaching tool to me.
In a well-written Wikipedia article, the big words are wikilinked. When one doesn't understand something, one clicks the links for further understanding.
This has always been the promise of hypertext, but it is only fully realized in Wikipedia. I couldn't agree less with the premise that Wikipedia is unaccessible.
Additionally, as the article notes, there is also Simple English Wikipedia.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/
It doesn't have 1.7 million articles, but... of course not. There aren't that many concepts in "simple English."
I already see URLs like this:
citibank.com.customers.update.spammer.com
It wouldn't take any more effort to make:
citibank.bank.customers.update.spammer.com
Most people don't know much about URLs. And that's assuming the mark even reads the URL at all.
Some people are sending huge graphics files and paying for badnwidth and/or sending to people with slow connectiuons, so they actually have a use for maximal compression.
I have to agree that for most people (myself included), compatibility is all that matters. I'm so glad Macs now can natively zip. But there are valid reasons to want compression over compatibility.
Not every software achieves maximum efficiency. It is perfectly imaginable that a compressor could be slow and bad. It is nice to see that these compressors did not suffer that fate.
I'd say Vista was failing badly and it's hurting computer sales.
Well... Mac sales in the U.S. are up 30% over last year.
Well... that explains why Vista is selling.
(Yeah I know... flamebait. But it had to be said.)
In all of your scenarios, you're not incorporating the impact of harvesting the power. What would it take, physically, to harvest the world's demand of power using tidal forces, even assuming extreme efficiency? Don't you think those collectors would have some effect on the inhabitants of the ocean?
If we had so many wind turbines that we were collecting enough power to run the world, would that not have some effect on the global wind patterns?
Also solar power cools the Earth's surface. Solar farms are envisioned as acres and acres of panels in the desert. That would turn a very hot spot into a very cold spot, changing the currents there, and thus affecting overall temperature distribution (ie, the wind).
Same sort of thing goes for tidal energy. If you collect enough, you are going to affect life in the ocean. There just ain't no free ride.
But there are two viable solutions:
There was a Monty Python episode where they were comparing penguin brains to human brains. They found that if the penguin were scaled up to human size, its brain was still smaller than a human brain. But -- and this is the important part -- it's larger than it was before!
Yeah, and the Swift Boat Veterans use Apache.
It's like the world is upside down!
Please engage sense of humor before flaming. Sheeze.
*snif!*
As the op, I was surprised as well... it was supposed to be a joke (and a lame attempt at an (obviously late) first post).
:)
Very insightful of me, eh?
As to it being the dumbest thing ever... again... a joke, OK? Sheeze.
As a highway gets wider and wider... it approaches a parking lot.
I don't really like the idea of people being able to remotely look at my screen. You may as well just put video cameras behind everyone and remind people that "we can switch to your camera at any time". Just because technology makes snooping easier, it doesn't mean we should take advantage of it.
VNC saves my butt all day long. Instead of schlepping to every computer every time there is a problem, I simply say, "OK, I'm going to look in on your screen now," double-click their name (Apple Remote Desktop is da bomb, in this respect), and take it from there. And no, that's not just me being lazy; it is me being more efficient. I can do more work in a day because of VNC.
And as an interesting aside, my company is all-Mac. All of our new laptops have cameras built right into them. So I have a camera pointing not at their screen, but at their face! To be fair, Apple ties the power to the camera to a LED, so they can tell if the camera is on... and I don't have off-the-shelf tools to hook into that camera, but... it is there. Weird, eh?
To be honest, I'm not sure that privacy and the future are compatible. I have yet to see someone prove to me that privacy can be maintained by other than artificial (ie, legal... and therefore transient) means.
Third-party networking cards and outside laptops are both locked out on my network. It's really easy to do. :)
But on the plus side, I'm hardly draconian about non-work surfing. As long as I have bandwidth to spare, I'd rather my staff be happy than oppressed.
I just got fired for reading this article.
:P