What you are describing is the stable versions proposal, and it's currently being worked on by the developers. Basically, an administrator would be able to go in and flag a specific revision as being "stable", and that's what all readers of the article would see. You could of course choose to see the development version or make edits to the development version, but it will take an administrator to update the stable version, and he will do so by comparing the changes since the last stable version and making sure everything is legitimate.
What you are describing is the stable versions proposal. We're trying to go ahead with this but we're meeting strong resistance, even by fellow administrators. They say it's too "unwiki" and that it will no longer be "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit". I actually tried setting Elephant to a stable version last night, but was reverted by another administrator.
You may be misunderstanding how Wikipedia works...
Even if 1,000 skinheads do get together and try to "vote" to change the article on The Holocaust, it won't do anything. We'd simply protect the article and block the lot of them. Wikipedia is not a democracy (this is actually one of our policies), and we administrators have lots of discretion to simply get rid of obviously false or stupid entries. Go check out our articles on Evolution or Global warming; I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
There's this misconception out there that if you get enough people to come edit you can make Wikipedia say anything you want by the sheer sake of having numbers on your side. This is simply not true.
So what if a few pages displayed vandalized entries for a little while? Two nights ago we were on such high alert that the Stephen Colbert vandalism was reverted on average in under 30 seconds. And that was before I started locking down pages. Considering the vandalism was spurred on by a television show with an audience of over one million people, it only took about half a dozen admins to quelch all of the vandalism.
There's only one way to fight vandalism, and it's the good old-fashioned way... get some troops on the ground. I spent two nights ago protecting over a dozen elephant-related articles (Elephant the album, Dumbo the Elephant, Elephant Seal, etc.) and blocked a few dozen people I caught inserting false numbers about elephant populations. As Wikipedia administrators we really have all the tools that we could possibly need. I just looked at the live stream of all edits on the English Wikipedia and reviewed the ones being made to all pages related to Stephen Colbert, Elephants, or northwestern states.
Sadly, I've seen 5th grade papers where the kid spelled through 'thru' and the teacher didn't let out a peep.:(
Through->thru was one of Webster's proposed spelling reforms. Don't knock it too badly. You may be more familiar with some of Webster's other proposed spelling reforms that did succeed, such as colour->color, programme->program, etc. Through->thru didn't have quite the same level of success but it's still used ubiquitously on road signs for space-saving concerns.
It's really sad that the FBI isn't using a simple salt on their stored passwords. This "hacker" was only able to get his hand on the hashed passwords, so his dictionary attack would only work if the passwords were stored unsalted. That's ridiculous. Hell, MediaWiki salts passwords by default... the FBI can't do it?!
Awww crap, looks like I get another indirect mention in a newspaper article about Wikipedia:-( I protected the article on Cuba over a month ago, and then,... we all just sort of forgot about it. One way to improve Wikipedia would be to make a better system for identifying articles that have been protected for too long and deal with them accordingly.
I may be mistaken, but I thought there was no "Ten" in binary. I thought it was one zero. As I understood it, ten was a product of a base 10 system.
Of COURSE there is ten in binary, it's just represented as 1010. The word "ten" refers to the concept of the number ten... which simply has different representations in different bases, 1010 in base 2, 31 in base 3, 10 in base 10, A in base 16, etc.
Nothing is undeniable, nothing is certain. What you think true today can be positively wrong tomorrow. Earth is not flat, earth is not the center of the universe.
Might as well just fucking give up on ever knowing anything at all then, right? You're using a logical fallacy. Let me demonstrate. If we can't ever really know anything for sure, then we can't even really know for sure that we don't know anything for sure.
There's actually a proper way to cite Wikipedia. You need to click on the "Cite this article" link in the Toolbox. It will cite the article in MLA, Chicago, whatever format you use, and it will also generate a permanent link to the specific revision you used.
You don't seem to know what "censorship" means. Censorship refers to when the government prevents publication of materials, not a private website. Wikipedia is a private website, and it "censors" things all the time: vandalism, factually incorrect statements, attack pages, etc. The point of Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia, not a free webhost where any random crap can be posted. To the end of being a useful encyclopedia, Wikipedia does "censor" out the nonsense. And that's their right.
And as for your statement that Wikipedia is banned from use in undergraduate writing, do you have a source? I know, at least at my university, that's not true, and I haven't heard it elsewhere either.
For what it's worth, I am an administrator on the English Wikipedia, and I did disagree with the decision to delete Brian Peppers. But there's lots of much more important things to worry about, and I've agreed with Jimbo Wales on a number of other situations, so life goes on.
By the way, any Administrator has access to all deleted pages (except ones that have manually been deleted from the database, which are few and far between). And the reason Justin Berry was deleted and rewritten was because it was originally written by self-identified pedophiles and could've potentially gotten Wikimedia into trouble because it was a biography of a living person and did not cite everything properly, thus possibly leaving Wikipedia open to libel lawsuits.
You made an incorrect calculation. What's relevant here is the speed of light, not how long the laser pulse lasts. It would still take some milliseconds for the light to get to your orbital relay and then back to ground.
Can we please stop using this "missing link" terminology? It's one of those terms often bandied about by creationists, but it has very little meaning in science. And anyway, everytime we find another transitional fossil the creationists are just going to point to the two gaps on either side of the new transitional and say, "Now there's two missing links! Nyah nyah nyah!" They already don't believe evolution is possible anyway.
Now as for this find, there's something very important here that the writeup isn't covering. The scientists used their theory to not only predict the existence of such a transitional species, but also where, geologically, it would be located. And guess what - they found what they were looking for exactly where they were looking for it! Talk about predictive power! The predictive power of the theory of evolution is one of its many strengths, and one often overlooked by science-deniers.
I'd rather pay a musician $4 for an album than pay $16 to a label.
That argument is kind of weak... of course anyone would be willing to pay less for the same thing, and give the finger to the record companies to boot.
I'm not ashamed to say I considered buying gold in WoW.
Let's face it, time can be valuable. Especially in your case. I don't make nearly as much as you but even for me my time would be better spent working for money and buying that epic mount rather than working for in-game gold. In the end I stepped back and realized, geez, I'm considering paying real world money to get something in a game... and my solution was to stop playing the game. But I can easily see how, if one doesn't want to quit the game, the expenditure could be worth it. Some things you just "have to have" if the game is going to be as fun as possible. The epic mount was one of them... faster travel was a big plus and on large scale battles if you didn't have one and your opponent did you would never be able to run away.
Join the freaking reality-based community already. Opposing human/animal hybrids because of some hypothetical sentient dog you're making up is just like the anti-gun people who are saying.50-caliber rifles should be banned because they're, like, the most destructive weapons ever and are used to commit all sorts of heinous crimes and assassinations.
Kind of funny how you posted this 6 minutes after I did. Anyway, why do you (and Animenfo) call it Planetes? I have the DVD and it just says PLANETES. Anyway, Planetes is Greek for wanderers, which is coincidentally also what the English word planet is derived from (because planets are lights that wander in the sky against the "fixed" background of stars). So there's some evidence for the title being "Planetes"... what interpretation do you have for "Planet ES"?
Although I am happy that they shined the light on this, it seems the story is no longer about the Abramoff bribes, but about if Republicans or Democrats took more.
There's one reason and one reason only that the focus has shifted away from the actual problem here... the Republicans. By attempting to deflect the scandal by falsely accusing it at Democrats they have actually shifted the discourse. And it doesn't help that there are various pundits repeating the lie over and over (Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, etc.). The simple fact is that Abramoff did not have any fradulent dealings with Democrats. Why? Because he was exclusively dealt with Republicans as a general rule. It's that simple. The Abramoff scandal is an exclusively Republican scandal and by painting it as anything else the media is deceiving us.
Yeah, it's not that there are more influential Republicans (IE: Politicians WORTH paying off) because they control the Executive, Legislative AND Judicial branches that the Republicans got the majority of the numbers... nope, it's because Republicans are inherently dirty. Glad you cleared that up.
Actually the reason is because of the K Street Project, which was designed to deny lobbyist access to Democrats. In other words, Abramoff only influence peddled with Republicans because he only dealt with Republicans as a general rule.
And for an excellent anime examining the possible effects of the issue of orbital debris (and for all I know, the only anime), check out "Planetes". I don't think it's been licensed for American TV distribution but it has been dubbed and fansubbed into English and it's available on DVD or *wink wink* online.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are describing is the stable versions proposal, and it's currently being worked on by the developers. Basically, an administrator would be able to go in and flag a specific revision as being "stable", and that's what all readers of the article would see. You could of course choose to see the development version or make edits to the development version, but it will take an administrator to update the stable version, and he will do so by comparing the changes since the last stable version and making sure everything is legitimate.
What you are describing is the stable versions proposal. We're trying to go ahead with this but we're meeting strong resistance, even by fellow administrators. They say it's too "unwiki" and that it will no longer be "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit". I actually tried setting Elephant to a stable version last night, but was reverted by another administrator.
You may be misunderstanding how Wikipedia works ...
Even if 1,000 skinheads do get together and try to "vote" to change the article on The Holocaust, it won't do anything. We'd simply protect the article and block the lot of them. Wikipedia is not a democracy (this is actually one of our policies), and we administrators have lots of discretion to simply get rid of obviously false or stupid entries. Go check out our articles on Evolution or Global warming; I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
There's this misconception out there that if you get enough people to come edit you can make Wikipedia say anything you want by the sheer sake of having numbers on your side. This is simply not true.
So what if a few pages displayed vandalized entries for a little while? Two nights ago we were on such high alert that the Stephen Colbert vandalism was reverted on average in under 30 seconds. And that was before I started locking down pages. Considering the vandalism was spurred on by a television show with an audience of over one million people, it only took about half a dozen admins to quelch all of the vandalism.
There's only one way to fight vandalism, and it's the good old-fashioned way ... get some troops on the ground. I spent two nights ago protecting over a dozen elephant-related articles (Elephant the album, Dumbo the Elephant, Elephant Seal, etc.) and blocked a few dozen people I caught inserting false numbers about elephant populations. As Wikipedia administrators we really have all the tools that we could possibly need. I just looked at the live stream of all edits on the English Wikipedia and reviewed the ones being made to all pages related to Stephen Colbert, Elephants, or northwestern states.
(User:Cyde on en-wiki)
Sadly, I've seen 5th grade papers where the kid spelled through 'thru' and the teacher didn't let out a peep. :(
Through->thru was one of Webster's proposed spelling reforms. Don't knock it too badly. You may be more familiar with some of Webster's other proposed spelling reforms that did succeed, such as colour->color, programme->program, etc. Through->thru didn't have quite the same level of success but it's still used ubiquitously on road signs for space-saving concerns.
It's really sad that the FBI isn't using a simple salt on their stored passwords. This "hacker" was only able to get his hand on the hashed passwords, so his dictionary attack would only work if the passwords were stored unsalted. That's ridiculous. Hell, MediaWiki salts passwords by default ... the FBI can't do it?!
Awww crap, looks like I get another indirect mention in a newspaper article about Wikipedia :-( I protected the article on Cuba over a month ago, and then, ... we all just sort of forgot about it. One way to improve Wikipedia would be to make a better system for identifying articles that have been protected for too long and deal with them accordingly.
Yeah, I am User:Cyde on Wikipedia.
I may be mistaken, but I thought there was no "Ten" in binary. I thought it was one zero. As I understood it, ten was a product of a base 10 system.
... which simply has different representations in different bases, 1010 in base 2, 31 in base 3, 10 in base 10, A in base 16, etc.
Of COURSE there is ten in binary, it's just represented as 1010. The word "ten" refers to the concept of the number ten
Nothing is undeniable, nothing is certain. What you think true today can be positively wrong tomorrow. Earth is not flat, earth is not the center of the universe.
Might as well just fucking give up on ever knowing anything at all then, right? You're using a logical fallacy. Let me demonstrate. If we can't ever really know anything for sure, then we can't even really know for sure that we don't know anything for sure.
It's a paradox. It's a garbage argument.
There's actually a proper way to cite Wikipedia. You need to click on the "Cite this article" link in the Toolbox. It will cite the article in MLA, Chicago, whatever format you use, and it will also generate a permanent link to the specific revision you used.
You don't seem to know what "censorship" means. Censorship refers to when the government prevents publication of materials, not a private website. Wikipedia is a private website, and it "censors" things all the time: vandalism, factually incorrect statements, attack pages, etc. The point of Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia, not a free webhost where any random crap can be posted. To the end of being a useful encyclopedia, Wikipedia does "censor" out the nonsense. And that's their right.
And as for your statement that Wikipedia is banned from use in undergraduate writing, do you have a source? I know, at least at my university, that's not true, and I haven't heard it elsewhere either.
For what it's worth, I am an administrator on the English Wikipedia, and I did disagree with the decision to delete Brian Peppers. But there's lots of much more important things to worry about, and I've agreed with Jimbo Wales on a number of other situations, so life goes on. By the way, any Administrator has access to all deleted pages (except ones that have manually been deleted from the database, which are few and far between). And the reason Justin Berry was deleted and rewritten was because it was originally written by self-identified pedophiles and could've potentially gotten Wikimedia into trouble because it was a biography of a living person and did not cite everything properly, thus possibly leaving Wikipedia open to libel lawsuits.
You made an incorrect calculation. What's relevant here is the speed of light, not how long the laser pulse lasts. It would still take some milliseconds for the light to get to your orbital relay and then back to ground.
A Darwinian? Other than in the context of the computer game "Darwinians", I have no idea what in the hell you're trying to say.
Can we please stop using this "missing link" terminology? It's one of those terms often bandied about by creationists, but it has very little meaning in science. And anyway, everytime we find another transitional fossil the creationists are just going to point to the two gaps on either side of the new transitional and say, "Now there's two missing links! Nyah nyah nyah!" They already don't believe evolution is possible anyway.
Now as for this find, there's something very important here that the writeup isn't covering. The scientists used their theory to not only predict the existence of such a transitional species, but also where, geologically, it would be located. And guess what - they found what they were looking for exactly where they were looking for it! Talk about predictive power! The predictive power of the theory of evolution is one of its many strengths, and one often overlooked by science-deniers.
Thanks for the free "promotion". You just linked to my edit :-P
I'd rather pay a musician $4 for an album than pay $16 to a label.
... of course anyone would be willing to pay less for the same thing, and give the finger to the record companies to boot.
That argument is kind of weak
Actually, 99% of podcasts aren't even computer-related. They cover a much wider swatch of the spectrum than you seem to think.
I'm not ashamed to say I considered buying gold in WoW.
... and my solution was to stop playing the game. But I can easily see how, if one doesn't want to quit the game, the expenditure could be worth it. Some things you just "have to have" if the game is going to be as fun as possible. The epic mount was one of them ... faster travel was a big plus and on large scale battles if you didn't have one and your opponent did you would never be able to run away.
Let's face it, time can be valuable. Especially in your case. I don't make nearly as much as you but even for me my time would be better spent working for money and buying that epic mount rather than working for in-game gold. In the end I stepped back and realized, geez, I'm considering paying real world money to get something in a game
Join the freaking reality-based community already. Opposing human/animal hybrids because of some hypothetical sentient dog you're making up is just like the anti-gun people who are saying .50-caliber rifles should be banned because they're, like, the most destructive weapons ever and are used to commit all sorts of heinous crimes and assassinations.
Kind of funny how you posted this 6 minutes after I did. Anyway, why do you (and Animenfo) call it Planetes? I have the DVD and it just says PLANETES. Anyway, Planetes is Greek for wanderers, which is coincidentally also what the English word planet is derived from (because planets are lights that wander in the sky against the "fixed" background of stars). So there's some evidence for the title being "Planetes" ... what interpretation do you have for "Planet ES"?
Although I am happy that they shined the light on this, it seems the story is no longer about the Abramoff bribes, but about if Republicans or Democrats took more. There's one reason and one reason only that the focus has shifted away from the actual problem here ... the Republicans. By attempting to deflect the scandal by falsely accusing it at Democrats they have actually shifted the discourse. And it doesn't help that there are various pundits repeating the lie over and over (Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, etc.). The simple fact is that Abramoff did not have any fradulent dealings with Democrats. Why? Because he was exclusively dealt with Republicans as a general rule. It's that simple. The Abramoff scandal is an exclusively Republican scandal and by painting it as anything else the media is deceiving us.
Yeah, it's not that there are more influential Republicans (IE: Politicians WORTH paying off) because they control the Executive, Legislative AND Judicial branches that the Republicans got the majority of the numbers... nope, it's because Republicans are inherently dirty. Glad you cleared that up.
Actually the reason is because of the K Street Project, which was designed to deny lobbyist access to Democrats. In other words, Abramoff only influence peddled with Republicans because he only dealt with Republicans as a general rule.
And for an excellent anime examining the possible effects of the issue of orbital debris (and for all I know, the only anime), check out "Planetes". I don't think it's been licensed for American TV distribution but it has been dubbed and fansubbed into English and it's available on DVD or *wink wink* online.