Why do people think that it is necessary to go faster than the speed of light "to go faster"? You can go arbitrarily fast by simply getting closer and closer to the speed of light. If you could reach the speed of light (which is impossible), you would be able to traverse the entire universe in no time (from your reference frame). "Warp" speed is not necessary.
Yeah, obviously Jimbo is using that $6000 to buy a Porsche, or rent another beachside house... or maybe it's used on the thousands of letters/cards sent out to prospective and active donors.
"Show me modern physics papers that contain math that most people with any scientific or engineering background can understand, and that are just a few pages long."
When the next Einstein comes along, I'll show you such papers. Until then, people will continue to "brute force" progress in their field.
The last time it was even suggested that Wikipedia might go to advertisements, a large portion of the Spanish Wikipedia split off and formed Enciclopedia Libre, drastically setting back the entire site. Only more recently are they being merged back together.
Well, this is how it has always been. Almost all of the funds are needed to keep up with the exponentially-increasing traffic to the site. Without those, the site will just get slower and slower (and slower).
By 2007, it will cost several million dollars just to keep Wikipedia running. If Google comes through on its past statement of support, and other companies join in, then Wikipedia probably wouldn't need to go to ads. Some ideas that have been suggested for non-invasive implementation of advertisements would be to only display them for anonymous users (not registered users), or to have a separate site that only hosts high-quality, highly-accurate articles, and make that site ad-based.
Britannica has dozens of layers of fact-checking and proofreading, and they still have about 3 errors per article (from Nature). How many layers will the Digital Universe have? One good thing about the Digital Universe is that their content, at least if it's copied from Wikipedia, will be under GFDL, and so can be copied back to Wikipedia (hopefully, their versions will be minus a few errors).
"The reason Nupedia is having trouble right now is that we've had trouble convincing academics that it is indeed a bona fide cathedral. If we were to convince them of that--which I think we will, eventually--you'll see just how wrong you really are (that Nupedia is a failure)."
Well, he was wrong. Experts have little time to waste on stuff like this, and Nupedia died. Will this die? Who knows.. but Sanger has been wrong before.
"My original submission described it as 'against Wikipedia's guideline' -- Zonk must have decided that 'in violation of Wikipedia's policy' sounded better."
Is it normal for Slashdot's editors to change submitters' comments into falsehoods? Now, if only Slashdot had an "edit" button....
Sanger was an employee of Wales. How he could be considered a "co-founder", who knows... That doesn't mean Larry wouldn't like to present himself as such.
You can cite any past version of an article by going to the History tab and clicking on a date for an edit. That will add an "old revision ID" to the URL of the page, and that ID will never change.
The parent referred to this site, which states that the group is gathering complaints to file a class action lawsuit against Wikipedia.
The problem? The people hosting the site are far from unbiased on the topic. The site is hosted by baou.com, which runs QuakeAID, a bogus "charity" set up after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
Why are they mad at Wikipedia? After the earthquake, a member of QuakeAID with the username Baoutrust used Wikipedia to promote the QuakeAID article and the QuakeAID website. Apparently, this included listing QuakeAID on the list of charities for the tsunami survivors. When their true nature was discovered, they were removed from the list, and they got pissed. Since then, they've been smearing Wikipedia at every possible chance.
There is also some question about how Nature arrived at their article lengths. On the page listing the articles in question, they claim, "All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias. In a small number of cases some material, such as reference lists, was removed to make the lengths of the entries more similar." However, if you look at the examples they used, in some cases it seems impossible for them to have arrived at similar lengths for an article.
For example, their smallest article, on Robert Burns Woodward, weighs in at just over 200 bytes, versus Wikipedia's 13.5 KB (this number doesn't include any "wikicode", or tables, external links, reference sections, etc). How could they have made such drastically different articles to be of similar lengths? Another example is the West Nile Virus article (WP's is over 5x the length of EB's).
It would seem that they either averaged all the lengths together, and compared those numbers, or they purposely trimmed content from the Wikipedia entries. This is not necessarily a good idea, since we're talking about science articles. The "lead section" text might provide an oversummarization to keep the section short (eg: electrons orbit a nucleus in a similar way to how planets orbit the Sun), while the rest of the text explains in detail what actual occurs.
So, there is some amount of ambiguity there, more than I would expect from a scientific journal.
"Although no one was willing to say it to his face, the real reason the error in Siegenthaler's article persisted for so long is that not many people care enough about him to read his eponymous article."
Agreed. Here's an experiment: Go to Wikipedia, click on "Random article". Look at the history for that page, and determine how long it has existed, and how many edits it has had. Now, compare to the Seigenthaler article:
1st edit: 13:53, 15 September 2004. Created with only the contents, "John Seigenthaler SR"
2nd edit: 08:29, 26 May 2005. False biography added.
3rd edit: 15:52, 29 May 2005. Minor spelling correction.
4th edit: 05:06, 23 September 2005. False info deleted, replaced with correct info.
So, the article lasted for 9 months with only his name. Now, any average Wikipedian who came across this article would have marked it for "speedy deletion" immediately, since there is no content/context. In the span of over 1 year, the article had 4 edits. How does your random article compare? How about 10 random articles, or 100?
"(Insert oblig. "hacking is way cooler than just BUYING a beer stein like the rest of the sheep!!!1! It's about the JOURNEY d00d!!" comment in response to howls of laughter over such a useless activity.)"
You forgot to add an obligatory comment refuting the hallowed efforts of grammar nazis.
Yes, of course anecdote is not data. I was joking. I was showing you what it would be like if we accepted the same sort of anecdotal evidence that is accepted in bioethics. How could you not see that?
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people think that it is necessary to go faster than the speed of light "to go faster"? You can go arbitrarily fast by simply getting closer and closer to the speed of light. If you could reach the speed of light (which is impossible), you would be able to traverse the entire universe in no time (from your reference frame). "Warp" speed is not necessary.
Yeah, obviously Jimbo is using that $6000 to buy a Porsche, or rent another beachside house... or maybe it's used on the thousands of letters/cards sent out to prospective and active donors.
"Show me modern physics papers that contain math that most people with any scientific or engineering background can understand, and that are just a few pages long."
When the next Einstein comes along, I'll show you such papers. Until then, people will continue to "brute force" progress in their field.
Show me the "brilliant physicists" that have published four papers in one year, each individually deserving of a Nobel Prize.
"And I hope to win the lottery. But hopes are not expectations."
Quite the rebuttal.
There is a link to the Q1-2006 budget at the top of every English Wikipedia page, detailing the expected needs.
The last time it was even suggested that Wikipedia might go to advertisements, a large portion of the Spanish Wikipedia split off and formed Enciclopedia Libre, drastically setting back the entire site. Only more recently are they being merged back together.
Well, this is how it has always been. Almost all of the funds are needed to keep up with the exponentially-increasing traffic to the site. Without those, the site will just get slower and slower (and slower).
By 2007, it will cost several million dollars just to keep Wikipedia running. If Google comes through on its past statement of support, and other companies join in, then Wikipedia probably wouldn't need to go to ads. Some ideas that have been suggested for non-invasive implementation of advertisements would be to only display them for anonymous users (not registered users), or to have a separate site that only hosts high-quality, highly-accurate articles, and make that site ad-based.
But, the earth is hollow.
"Here is Lieutenant Ripley testing the device."
She is very shiny!
Pomo bullshit at its best! Insightful indeed....
Literally!
Britannica has dozens of layers of fact-checking and proofreading, and they still have about 3 errors per article (from Nature). How many layers will the Digital Universe have? One good thing about the Digital Universe is that their content, at least if it's copied from Wikipedia, will be under GFDL, and so can be copied back to Wikipedia (hopefully, their versions will be minus a few errors).
Sanger said this in 2001 about Nupedia:
"The reason Nupedia is having trouble right now is that we've had trouble convincing academics that it is indeed a bona fide cathedral. If we were to convince them of that--which I think we will, eventually--you'll see just how wrong you really are (that Nupedia is a failure)."
Well, he was wrong. Experts have little time to waste on stuff like this, and Nupedia died. Will this die? Who knows.. but Sanger has been wrong before.
According to Carnildo, who submitted the post:
"My original submission described it as 'against Wikipedia's guideline' -- Zonk must have decided that 'in violation of Wikipedia's policy' sounded better."
Is it normal for Slashdot's editors to change submitters' comments into falsehoods? Now, if only Slashdot had an "edit" button....
Sanger was an employee of Wales. How he could be considered a "co-founder", who knows... That doesn't mean Larry wouldn't like to present himself as such.
You can cite any past version of an article by going to the History tab and clicking on a date for an edit. That will add an "old revision ID" to the URL of the page, and that ID will never change.
The parent referred to this site, which states that the group is gathering complaints to file a class action lawsuit against Wikipedia.
The problem? The people hosting the site are far from unbiased on the topic. The site is hosted by baou.com, which runs QuakeAID, a bogus "charity" set up after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
Why are they mad at Wikipedia? After the earthquake, a member of QuakeAID with the username Baoutrust used Wikipedia to promote the QuakeAID article and the QuakeAID website. Apparently, this included listing QuakeAID on the list of charities for the tsunami survivors. When their true nature was discovered, they were removed from the list, and they got pissed. Since then, they've been smearing Wikipedia at every possible chance.
There is also some question about how Nature arrived at their article lengths. On the page listing the articles in question, they claim, "All entries were chosen to be approximately the same length in both encyclopaedias. In a small number of cases some material, such as reference lists, was removed to make the lengths of the entries more similar." However, if you look at the examples they used, in some cases it seems impossible for them to have arrived at similar lengths for an article.
For example, their smallest article, on Robert Burns Woodward, weighs in at just over 200 bytes, versus Wikipedia's 13.5 KB (this number doesn't include any "wikicode", or tables, external links, reference sections, etc). How could they have made such drastically different articles to be of similar lengths? Another example is the West Nile Virus article (WP's is over 5x the length of EB's).
It would seem that they either averaged all the lengths together, and compared those numbers, or they purposely trimmed content from the Wikipedia entries. This is not necessarily a good idea, since we're talking about science articles. The "lead section" text might provide an oversummarization to keep the section short (eg: electrons orbit a nucleus in a similar way to how planets orbit the Sun), while the rest of the text explains in detail what actual occurs.
So, there is some amount of ambiguity there, more than I would expect from a scientific journal.
"Although no one was willing to say it to his face, the real reason the error in Siegenthaler's article persisted for so long is that not many people care enough about him to read his eponymous article."
Agreed. Here's an experiment: Go to Wikipedia, click on "Random article". Look at the history for that page, and determine how long it has existed, and how many edits it has had. Now, compare to the Seigenthaler article:
1st edit: 13:53, 15 September 2004. Created with only the contents, "John Seigenthaler SR"
2nd edit: 08:29, 26 May 2005. False biography added.
3rd edit: 15:52, 29 May 2005. Minor spelling correction.
4th edit: 05:06, 23 September 2005. False info deleted, replaced with correct info.
So, the article lasted for 9 months with only his name. Now, any average Wikipedian who came across this article would have marked it for "speedy deletion" immediately, since there is no content/context. In the span of over 1 year, the article had 4 edits. How does your random article compare? How about 10 random articles, or 100?
"(Insert oblig. "hacking is way cooler than just BUYING a beer stein like the rest of the sheep!!!1! It's about the JOURNEY d00d!!" comment in response to howls of laughter over such a useless activity.)"
You forgot to add an obligatory comment refuting the hallowed efforts of grammar nazis.
Actually, no. Higher level administrators at Wikipedia have access to a "checkuser" feature, which returns the IP address for any registered username.
"By all means use wikipedia as an information resource, but also make sure that you another source that validates the information."
/. user)
Shouldn't all information sources be corroborated? (dic. def. link provided for the average
Yes, of course anecdote is not data. I was joking. I was showing you what it would be like if we accepted the same sort of anecdotal evidence that is accepted in bioethics. How could you not see that?