I don't think anyone is arguing that the math should be taken out. But a great majority of the math/science articles fail to begin with introductory material at the beginning. Introductory material can be helpful for the layman trying to figure out the significance of a term, while those who are more advanced can scroll down to the complex math and jargon.
However, many Wikipedia articles are written in such a way as to begin with jargon, continue with jargon, and end with links to journal articles written in academic jargon. As an encyclopedia, it behooves Wikipedia to provide a jargon-free explanation up front before launching into field-specific obscurities.
Ha ha, very funny. The explicit purpose of Wikipedia is to deliver encyclopedic (tertiary source) knowledge to everyone (from high schoolers to PhDs). The explicit purpose of Wired is to provide news and commentary for a tech-literate readership. Using unexplained tech jargon in the former venue is poor form, in the latter venue is simply knowing your readership.
But thanks for contributing useless hair-splitting and idiotic moral indignation to the discussion.
Thanks for the hint. I've been an admin on Wikipedia for three years now, and I'm quite well-versed in writing articles. The issue is not how Wikipedians should research and write articles, it's how the casual user (those people we're ostensibly writing this encyclopedia for) encounters and interacts with our work.
The Wired article has several good examples of needlessly obtuse, jargon-filled Wikipedia copy contrasted with layman-readable, yet scientifically accurate explanations from alternate sources. The question here is not one of dumbing down or of explaining the entire concept from start to finish in simple terms. It's explaining what the concept is and why it's important in a paragraph or two, such that even someone with no background in the field (be it genetics or set theory or whatever) can understand the subject's relevance.
It is not acceptable to ask joe "trailerpark" sixpack or kartik the poor-english indian to engage in a research project in order to understand and fix the encyclopedia we're offering to him. Yes, it's free and it's volunteer written. But being free doesn't excuse it from being useless, and nor is it an outrageous request to ask volunteers to explain their contributions in plain English.
I agree that the highest goal of an encyclopedia is to spur its readers on to more learning. But there is a difference between a reader being inspired by the meaning/importance/usefulness of a subject that they nevertheless don't fully understand, and a reader that is forced to go hunting through external links to learn about a subject because the Wiki article is too fucking obtuse. Wikipedia exists so that they won't have to hunt through external links to get the general gist of something.
No, no, a thousand times no. We're not talking about the [[Chair]] or [[Hurrican Katrina]] entry, in which any average joe can google CNN stories and add to or improve an article. A great deal of the advanced math topics are things that it would take more than one university course in order to understand. Most expert content (journal pieces) is hidden behind paywalls (e.g. JSTOR).
Non-experts editing obscure articles to make them more readable is silly. If the copy-writing is bad, sure, you can go ahead and split up sentences, add commas, fix dangling participles. 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.
Expert articles need experts to explain them. A layman really cannot be expected to undertake the massive research effort to teach themselves all the math necessary to understand what a "residue class-wise affine group" is in order to write an explanatory piece of intro text such that the next poor slob doesn't have to engage in a month-long research project in order to understand an encyclopedia article.
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. An encyclopedia is a tertiary source of knowledge--primary and secondary sources broken down for the casual reader. Readers Digest:Books::Encyclopedia:Academia
I do not believe in "dumbing down" anything, but sometimes different levels of explanation are necessary, and this is something that wikipedia lacks for most science entries.
I strongly agree with this position. In fact, this is one of Richard Feynman's critiques of science writing in general. People need to have the meaning/application/importance of something explained to them. People who know the proof of something and have memorized its definition do not necessarily understand the concept enough to apply it. Regardless, this is how math/science topics on Wikipedia are written: explain in excruciating detail the multiple proofs for something, all marked up in LaTeX, without more than a sentence or two of explanation--of the concept or of the proofs themselves. It's infuriating.
I can't help but think that you're missing the point of an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is expressly made for non-experts so that they can get a general idea of what a subject is all about. It's a tertiary source--digested primary and secondary sources served up in a non-threatening, approachable manner.
Wikipedia oughtn't be an expert-level source right off the bat--the average joe should be able to look up something, and with a high school level education at least have the basics of something explained to them before the Wikipedia editors go batshit crazy with Math LaTeX markup writing impenetrable proofs all the way down the page.
I've tried, on occasion, tagging excessively obtuse math/science articles with {{importance}} or {{technical}} in an attempt to get editors to explain what a formula or theory does and why it's important in layman's terms, but they've been not only recalcitrant, but downright hostile.
And before you say that I should get an education or learn more about wikipedia, I am a PhD student and an admin on Wikipedia (disclaimer: I am not Essjay).
This is one of the systemic problems with Wikipedia. Just as the English wikipedia has certain systemic biases due to its contributors' backgrounds, the science and math articles suffer from a sub-systemic problem, insofar as their articles are written principally by and for a self-selecting group of experts.
If people want an expert resource, use Google Scholar and look up actual journal pieces. Wikipedia is a place for tertiary knowledge before expert knowledge. This is not to say that expert knowledge should be refused, it's merely to point out that having only expert knowledge does next to nothing to further to goal of building an encyclopedia.
Yes, when you cut off the next sentence from the "direct quote" it sure does sound much more positive.
...the Linux community's inability to design, plan, and act in a holistic manner (i.e., "across layers") as its greatest weakness. Linux on the desktop, user-friendly Linux, the consumer Linux software market, Linux games--all the historic struggles in all these areas can be adequately explained solely in terms of this one failing.
We may not consider it a problem, but it is certainly a liability risk that will worry school administrators weighing the risk of a lawsuit from angry parents.
Kids need to be taught to understand concepts, how to think critically, and how to engage in research. Having access to information and memorizing some of it is nearly worthless.
Even in grad school, PhD students surf the web (looking at shoe stores, reading their email) on their laptops during class. Even in small seminar classes, not lectures, ostensibly built around discussion. I'm convinced that no matter what age or maturity level or intellect the students have, laptops are a productivity killer.
That would be a convenience, but wouldn't solve the problems of pornography, broken equipment, network costs, hacking, etc. Nor would switching tablets for laptops necessarily do anything to improve achievement. All it would do is reduce your backpack load, which I'm not sure is worth the cost of the tablets and all the associated problems.
"The primary reason separation of powers exists is because government powers and services aren't naturally protective of your right. If politician were already respectful of your right, there wouldn't be any need for checks against abuse of power. If corrupt congressmen couldn't be used to sell out your rights to the highest bidder, no one would bother with congressional oversight or independent counsels. If there were no more unconstitutional laws or executive overreach, no one would need a Supreme Court much less the Second Amendement to protect themselves. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
I believe numbers 4 through 50 in your list are occupied by: non-broken support for XHTML, CSS 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, DOM, and the other relevant W3C standards.
Agreed, giving the end user the ability to control what content they are subjected to is really the deal-maker/breaker for me. I just can't use a browser riddled with ads anymore. Unless I can find an extension or plugin allowing me to block ad content (PithHelmet for Safari, CamiTools for Camino, AdBlock Plus for Firefox, OmniWeb's built-in blocker) I'm just not going to be able to stomach it.
The problem IE faces is the level to which it is beholden to other companies that rely on it to not allow end users to block their content. If IE were to introduce an AdBlock-type ability into IE they would get their pants sued off by every one of their competitors. Just look at Google--it's completely ad-dependent, and yet, with AdBlock the end user will never have to see "ads by google" ever again. In one fell swoop, leveraging their 85%+ marketshare Microsoft could destroy Google's revenue source. As a monopolist, they can never fix their inability to offer an AdBlocking solution.
It's pretty clear that Trent Reznor also uploaded high quality versions of his Closure DVDs and the Broken Movie when he couldn't get them properly released through the record companies without hassle. They're on Pirate Bay as uploaded by "seed0". He's a hero.
You'd rather have a new OS. But Apple Inc? They're making money hand-over-foot with their "pieces of shit" iPods. A huge amount of revenue. If they can add another huge stream of revenue with their iPhones they'll have expanded their market reach once again. A new OS isn't an expanding market, it doesn't bring in millions of new Apple users. Sure, it's a revenue shot in the arm, as people upgrade and buy new computers. But it's not a real expansion of Apple's business. iPhone = real growth. I'm willing to wait for Leopard to be ready.
Left and Right in U.S. politics do not have accepted definitions, despite what you claim. Liberalism as a political theory certainly does. Popular definitions of left and right (including their self-definitions) are different from your definitions.
You are calling me ignorant because my post doesn't fit your personal definition of leftism or rightism. You could have made a civil post differentiating between left and right in their self-definition or popular definition and in their practical implementation based on your observation. Instead you chose to lash out at me for using terminology "incorrectly," which is silly, unproductive behavior, and which stands little chance of persuading people.
The Republican Liberty Caucus is pretty clearly a libertarian wing of the U.S. right. Paleoconservatives and libertarians are not the same thing, although both can be classified as Liberals, as paleoconservatives tend to maintain more social conservatism and traditionalism in their ideology.
My explanation of how geek/punk ethics fit into parts of the U.S. left and right as they publicly conceive of themselves is not inaccurate. Moreover, asserting that because geek/punk ethics are Liberal that they therefore do not fit at all into the left/right schema of U.S. politics is silly. They do not fit wholly into one or the other, but they certainly share elements with both, which was the point I was making. As soon as you start using ad hominems your post becomes a flame rather than useful discourse.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think anyone is arguing that the math should be taken out. But a great majority of the math/science articles fail to begin with introductory material at the beginning. Introductory material can be helpful for the layman trying to figure out the significance of a term, while those who are more advanced can scroll down to the complex math and jargon.
However, many Wikipedia articles are written in such a way as to begin with jargon, continue with jargon, and end with links to journal articles written in academic jargon. As an encyclopedia, it behooves Wikipedia to provide a jargon-free explanation up front before launching into field-specific obscurities.
Ha ha, very funny. The explicit purpose of Wikipedia is to deliver encyclopedic (tertiary source) knowledge to everyone (from high schoolers to PhDs). The explicit purpose of Wired is to provide news and commentary for a tech-literate readership. Using unexplained tech jargon in the former venue is poor form, in the latter venue is simply knowing your readership.
But thanks for contributing useless hair-splitting and idiotic moral indignation to the discussion.
Thanks for the hint. I've been an admin on Wikipedia for three years now, and I'm quite well-versed in writing articles. The issue is not how Wikipedians should research and write articles, it's how the casual user (those people we're ostensibly writing this encyclopedia for) encounters and interacts with our work.
The Wired article has several good examples of needlessly obtuse, jargon-filled Wikipedia copy contrasted with layman-readable, yet scientifically accurate explanations from alternate sources. The question here is not one of dumbing down or of explaining the entire concept from start to finish in simple terms. It's explaining what the concept is and why it's important in a paragraph or two, such that even someone with no background in the field (be it genetics or set theory or whatever) can understand the subject's relevance.
It is not acceptable to ask joe "trailerpark" sixpack or kartik the poor-english indian to engage in a research project in order to understand and fix the encyclopedia we're offering to him. Yes, it's free and it's volunteer written. But being free doesn't excuse it from being useless, and nor is it an outrageous request to ask volunteers to explain their contributions in plain English.
I agree that the highest goal of an encyclopedia is to spur its readers on to more learning. But there is a difference between a reader being inspired by the meaning/importance/usefulness of a subject that they nevertheless don't fully understand, and a reader that is forced to go hunting through external links to learn about a subject because the Wiki article is too fucking obtuse. Wikipedia exists so that they won't have to hunt through external links to get the general gist of something.
No, no, a thousand times no. We're not talking about the [[Chair]] or [[Hurrican Katrina]] entry, in which any average joe can google CNN stories and add to or improve an article. A great deal of the advanced math topics are things that it would take more than one university course in order to understand. Most expert content (journal pieces) is hidden behind paywalls (e.g. JSTOR).
Non-experts editing obscure articles to make them more readable is silly. If the copy-writing is bad, sure, you can go ahead and split up sentences, add commas, fix dangling participles. 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.
Expert articles need experts to explain them. A layman really cannot be expected to undertake the massive research effort to teach themselves all the math necessary to understand what a "residue class-wise affine group" is in order to write an explanatory piece of intro text such that the next poor slob doesn't have to engage in a month-long research project in order to understand an encyclopedia article.
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. An encyclopedia is a tertiary source of knowledge--primary and secondary sources broken down for the casual reader. Readers Digest:Books::Encyclopedia:Academia
I strongly agree with this position. In fact, this is one of Richard Feynman's critiques of science writing in general. People need to have the meaning/application/importance of something explained to them. People who know the proof of something and have memorized its definition do not necessarily understand the concept enough to apply it. Regardless, this is how math/science topics on Wikipedia are written: explain in excruciating detail the multiple proofs for something, all marked up in LaTeX, without more than a sentence or two of explanation--of the concept or of the proofs themselves. It's infuriating.
I can't help but think that you're missing the point of an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is expressly made for non-experts so that they can get a general idea of what a subject is all about. It's a tertiary source--digested primary and secondary sources served up in a non-threatening, approachable manner.
Wikipedia oughtn't be an expert-level source right off the bat--the average joe should be able to look up something, and with a high school level education at least have the basics of something explained to them before the Wikipedia editors go batshit crazy with Math LaTeX markup writing impenetrable proofs all the way down the page.
I've tried, on occasion, tagging excessively obtuse math/science articles with {{importance}} or {{technical}} in an attempt to get editors to explain what a formula or theory does and why it's important in layman's terms, but they've been not only recalcitrant, but downright hostile.
And before you say that I should get an education or learn more about wikipedia, I am a PhD student and an admin on Wikipedia (disclaimer: I am not Essjay).
This is one of the systemic problems with Wikipedia. Just as the English wikipedia has certain systemic biases due to its contributors' backgrounds, the science and math articles suffer from a sub-systemic problem, insofar as their articles are written principally by and for a self-selecting group of experts.
If people want an expert resource, use Google Scholar and look up actual journal pieces. Wikipedia is a place for tertiary knowledge before expert knowledge. This is not to say that expert knowledge should be refused, it's merely to point out that having only expert knowledge does next to nothing to further to goal of building an encyclopedia.
Tux Racer? ASCII porn? Not so clever now are you?
We may not consider it a problem, but it is certainly a liability risk that will worry school administrators weighing the risk of a lawsuit from angry parents.
Is that a bias or a discernment based on empirical evidence?
Yes. No. Obviously.
Indeed, it was Einstein who said,
Kids need to be taught to understand concepts, how to think critically, and how to engage in research. Having access to information and memorizing some of it is nearly worthless.
Even in grad school, PhD students surf the web (looking at shoe stores, reading their email) on their laptops during class. Even in small seminar classes, not lectures, ostensibly built around discussion. I'm convinced that no matter what age or maturity level or intellect the students have, laptops are a productivity killer.
That would be a convenience, but wouldn't solve the problems of pornography, broken equipment, network costs, hacking, etc. Nor would switching tablets for laptops necessarily do anything to improve achievement. All it would do is reduce your backpack load, which I'm not sure is worth the cost of the tablets and all the associated problems.
"The primary reason separation of powers exists is because government powers and services aren't naturally protective of your right. If politician were already respectful of your right, there wouldn't be any need for checks against abuse of power. If corrupt congressmen couldn't be used to sell out your rights to the highest bidder, no one would bother with congressional oversight or independent counsels. If there were no more unconstitutional laws or executive overreach, no one would need a Supreme Court much less the Second Amendement to protect themselves. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
I like "+1 Inciteful" far better than "-1 Flamebait"...
I believe numbers 4 through 50 in your list are occupied by: non-broken support for XHTML, CSS 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, DOM, and the other relevant W3C standards.
Agreed, giving the end user the ability to control what content they are subjected to is really the deal-maker/breaker for me. I just can't use a browser riddled with ads anymore. Unless I can find an extension or plugin allowing me to block ad content (PithHelmet for Safari, CamiTools for Camino, AdBlock Plus for Firefox, OmniWeb's built-in blocker) I'm just not going to be able to stomach it.
The problem IE faces is the level to which it is beholden to other companies that rely on it to not allow end users to block their content. If IE were to introduce an AdBlock-type ability into IE they would get their pants sued off by every one of their competitors. Just look at Google--it's completely ad-dependent, and yet, with AdBlock the end user will never have to see "ads by google" ever again. In one fell swoop, leveraging their 85%+ marketshare Microsoft could destroy Google's revenue source. As a monopolist, they can never fix their inability to offer an AdBlocking solution.
Here's the link to the IE Blog posting:
t o-expect-from-ie-at-mix07.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/04/19/what-
Nice username. Don't let anyone tell you it's too soon.
It's pretty clear that Trent Reznor also uploaded high quality versions of his Closure DVDs and the Broken Movie when he couldn't get them properly released through the record companies without hassle. They're on Pirate Bay as uploaded by "seed0". He's a hero.
You'd rather have a new OS. But Apple Inc? They're making money hand-over-foot with their "pieces of shit" iPods. A huge amount of revenue. If they can add another huge stream of revenue with their iPhones they'll have expanded their market reach once again. A new OS isn't an expanding market, it doesn't bring in millions of new Apple users. Sure, it's a revenue shot in the arm, as people upgrade and buy new computers. But it's not a real expansion of Apple's business. iPhone = real growth. I'm willing to wait for Leopard to be ready.
Left and Right in U.S. politics do not have accepted definitions, despite what you claim. Liberalism as a political theory certainly does. Popular definitions of left and right (including their self-definitions) are different from your definitions.
You are calling me ignorant because my post doesn't fit your personal definition of leftism or rightism. You could have made a civil post differentiating between left and right in their self-definition or popular definition and in their practical implementation based on your observation. Instead you chose to lash out at me for using terminology "incorrectly," which is silly, unproductive behavior, and which stands little chance of persuading people.
Poll: More Republicans Satisfied With Sex Lives Than Democrats
Your point is refuted.
The Republican Liberty Caucus is pretty clearly a libertarian wing of the U.S. right. Paleoconservatives and libertarians are not the same thing, although both can be classified as Liberals, as paleoconservatives tend to maintain more social conservatism and traditionalism in their ideology.
My explanation of how geek/punk ethics fit into parts of the U.S. left and right as they publicly conceive of themselves is not inaccurate. Moreover, asserting that because geek/punk ethics are Liberal that they therefore do not fit at all into the left/right schema of U.S. politics is silly. They do not fit wholly into one or the other, but they certainly share elements with both, which was the point I was making. As soon as you start using ad hominems your post becomes a flame rather than useful discourse.