"Chernobyl killed about 3000 people" is an awful lie. The figure coined by a 'conclusion' published by the IAEA (a pro-nuke agency) is 4000, and is completely ridiculous because it:
does not precisely define the population concerned (by those 4000 deaths). The official conclusion is "premature deaths of around 4000 people from the 600 000 affected by the higher radiation doses", but "higher radiation doses" and the 600000 group composition, are not defined. The group may only have nearly not-exposed people!
this is not a scientific work, even if it is presented as such because nobody signed this conclusion. The WHO guys (Dr Repacholi), in charge of the pertinent study, even said that this "conclusion" was made by PR people... Read about it in Nuclear News (which is NOT a frenzy anti-nuke paper but a verious serious pro-nuke publication)
this conclusion was 'drawn' from a report which only exists in draft stage and was not scientifically published. No peer review... no scientific value
this conclusion is not expressed in the drafts reports
the conclusion is presented as global, albeit the reports only covers 3 countries
the 'health' report only studies cancers and leukemias, but many other problems arise (mutagen, teratogenesis...)
the 'health' report states major limits for his model and data:
radio-induced cancers appear at last 10 years after exposition, and on average after 20 years... but the data used were collected between 1992-1998 (less than 12 years after the accident)
bad data quality (as already stated in 1995 in a real ONU report)
the model used is far from perfect
low radiations were neglected albeit many experts think that they are dangerous, especially over long period and/or when ingested
a model used came from observations done in another context (Hiroshima and Nagasaki: brief major and external exposition, instead of the "long, minor and often internal" after Chernobyl)
French technocrats (EDF, the French electric power producer) wants to build a new nuclear power plant but they now must least faking to take care of people's will, see The public debate website (French).
Most French favor a step-by-step halt of the nuclear program (French), therefore EDF uses various little tricks in order to build the toy. The most funny trick is that we (the people) must help them decide without being informed because most pertinent information is kept secret. Moreover it seems that EDF will in fact decide, after the public debate, without any explanation. This is a sad joke, especially because some published information revealed potential problems (French).
I'm not against civil nuke...but the hell with lies and disinformation!
By 'fact' many mean 'widely propagated information'.
For scientific and technical matters this approach works because the very publication leads to an efficient peer review, and anyone can refute or rebut.
But outside of these categories some things presented as "facts" are pure and simple bullshit, for example because their authors deliberately omit important data, use distorted ways to relate or plainly lie. Therefore a pure 'fact' must be described by a witness, not by simply copy/pasting 'published' information.
There is a major and very dangerous confusion between the 'fact' that something is published and the 'factual' status of the information published. All efficient propagandists take gain of this.
More explicitly: after reading something presented as a fact and beginning with "According to a press release from the Agency For BlahBlahBlah (an apparently serious body):...", many will forget that the 'fact' is the press release, not its content! They will memorize the 'information' delivered and label it "it's a fact, it's true".
Therefore anyone who thinks that (in non scientific or technical fields) only "published material" is factual must, in order to avoid relaying disinformation or misinformation, take care of his sources honesty and rigor.
I experienced such mess on an article published in Wikipedia fr: a press release published by a group controlled by an ONU agency was considered as a 'fact' (French) albeit anyone can demonstrate that its content, stating that a scientific study concluded that the Chernobyl accident will kill about 4000 people, is pure and simple bullshit (French): no work published, no authors, no peer review, results obtained in a very specific context and limited perimeter by unreliable methods (as stated in the report draft)...)
When an analysis of such a 'fact' arises I think that an encyclopedia must clearly state that the reported announcement is plain disinformation, and link to the demonstration.
There is a proposal to avoid this mess by informing the reader of the level of trust he choose, more or less directly, to give to the information source: WebDSign
> only problem is just WHO gets to decide who is an 'expert'?
The existing user accounts and articles history offers a way, through some automagic analysis, to detect existing 'Wikipedia experts'.
The analysis will calculate, for each existing user, an 'efficiency score' on each category based on the volume, age, audience and stability of his writings. On each category the one-per-thousand best writers (who produce good-and-stable articles) will be immediately promoted into some 'Wikipedia expert' status. Those experts will form the category's "council", able to 'promote' other users into the 'Wikipedia expert' status.
> Separate articles into "reviewed" and "unreviewed" versions
[... ]
> reputation system
Let's devise objectives and constraints.
At the present pace the 'Wikipedia expert' will soon be of value, therefore we may enable experts to be interested in enhancing Wikipedia articles in order to gain respect. This may enable us to build the reputation system, which will benefit to WP and to the experts.
> new or otherwise unreviewed articles
> note saying "This article has not been reviewed
Any visitor must be able to read the cutting-edge version ('unstable') of an article or a reviewed one. He must be able to configure this in his personal preference and, while reading, switch between versions by clicking on a tab. Some will prefer to only read reviewed articles while others like the way it works right now.
> As for the reputation system itself: Users' reputations would start at 0
The existing user accounts and articles history offers a way, through some automagic analysis, to detect existing 'Wikipedia experts'.
The analysis will calculate, for each existing user, an 'efficiency score' on each category based on the volume, age, audience and stability of his writings. On each category the one-per-thousand best writers (who produce good-and-stable articles) will be immediately promoted into some 'Wikipedia expert' status and form the category's council. The council will be able to 'promote' other users into the 'Wikipedia expert' status.
> gradually increase both with time and with each new contribution they make
And decrease upon error discovery (which will increase the 'score' of the discoverer), inviting anyone not only to create and update but also to fix (correct).
> Certain individuals -- certified scientists, professors, etc -- could also be given field-specific bonuses
Indeed. The council in charge of the category will probably be populated, immediately after its creation, by people knowing those recognized experts. The council will be able to invite and promote them into 'experts'. An expert will be able to deliver the ultimate seal of trust to an article belonging to his category.
On some discussed or non scientific matters we need a trust-system enabling anybody to 'elect' his own experts, or to give to some entity the right to select adequate experts.
> reputations will be decreased whenever an edit is completely reverted... upon the new content validation. Indeed!
> The people need to have their point of view changed.
The people need objective information instead of the usual bullshit.
The IAEA (ONU's agency for civil nuclear energy), for example, is full of lies.
They even declared in 200509 that only 4000 people (grand total) have and will die from the Chernobyl disaster.
I tried to understand this figure: no published scientific work (only draft reports with no clear author for each assertion), the '4000' figure is not written in it as such and the corresponding approximation stated is only related to cancers to come in a given subgroup (not the grand total!), the model used (Hiroshima - Nagasaki) is inadequate (high external radiation during a brief period, albeit most Chernobyl's victims receive low radiation, with a fair internal (food) fraction, for a long period), the population analyzed is a subset (mainly Russians) and not qualified (therefore probably not representative and insufficient), the very report states that his results are highly inaccurate (lack of good data, inadequate model, other morbidity specific to the context...), the whole stuff is published as an OMS work albeit this organization is in fact tied to the IAEA for anything related to nuclear (OMS just cannot publish anything not approved by IAEA), during the official report presentation the OMS guy responsible for it did not even try to show that the model used is adequate and said that the published figure was coined by the "public relations" department and not by the scientists... I can carry on but you get the picture.
The whole stuff, published thru the media by some "The people need to have their point of view changed." sort of technocrats, gives "4000 people died and will die, period".
This is the way they think: "We cannot anymore decide without informing anyone, but the average citizen is stupid, let's feed him/her with some lies in order to continue doing our stuff".
Let's refuse and resist 'till some objective and clear information becomes available!
afaik MS developers of various softwares can somewhat better factorize
their (common) code because they work more closely, on this particular
side, than the 'free world'
the core MS-Windows system has high-level libraries used by all Microsoft
applications, therefore (in theory) any software developer working in a
Microsoft team is not poised to develop whatever was already coined by
another. they cooperate
many functions used by many applications (for example MS-Office) are therefore more or less ready-to-go, maybe even already loaded in the memory occupied by the operating system, when you invoke them. this speeds things up
under a free Unix the people developing system and applications rarely talk
to each other. the system provides much less high-level functions (above
the libc, X) than any modern MS-Windows and the only teams stuffing more
factorized high-level code inside it are working on toolkits (KDE,
GTK...).
note: one may argue that those libs are user-space things, please
note that I use 'system' in the broad sense
this is, at first glance, less efficient than MS-Windows because
there is no central authority pumping functions into a single library used
by all apps, therefore many applications don't use them. any given desktop
will consequently probably use many libraries providing the same services,
therefore many free applications come with their own code to do things
already done by other ones.
the MS-Windows approach is theoretically wonderful, mainly because less memory is occupied by various codes doing the same thing.
but it leads to various pitfalls. here are some not neglectable ones:
a truly useful library is generic and to reach this stage its developer
has to code a simple thing (thus reducing the factorization), to bloat it it
or to be a genious. in practice they are more and more bloated therefore
not bug-free
any bug in it may cause a failure in any software using it. if nearly
all software use it, well...
the bloated high-level services provided by MS-Windows are less stable when
the machine simultaneously runs many softwares, thanks to awful side
effects spawned by heavy multi-layered codes. therefore most users
try to run, on a given box, as few services as possible... loosing a good
part of the factorization benefits
from my experience the Unix approach is more and more efficient as time
passes. it now provides an environment more flexible, easy to maintain and
extend, which extracts more useful power from the hardware
it even gains, after a while, the benefit of the 'central library' approach
because efficient and stable libraries tend to gain audience among
developers, providing a common ground a posteriori (created for a
given client code, then evaluated and adopted for others). on this
particular matter the efficient way to do thing wins again: don't try to
predefine the whole solution, keep it simple, progress slowly, prefer
field-proven solutions
this somewhat reminds me of the 'forked childs' classic Unix trick, for a
piece of software, to honor requests for each request: run an instance for
each request. this means that a bug will probably scrap a request but not
block/stall the whole service, which is a very simple and efficient way to
achieve crude but often sufficient software-fault tolerance, albeit it is
was ressource-hungry. I write was because it is much more less a
system hog now, thanks to some low-level enhancements (started w vfork,
copy-on-write and such) conceived after this approach
a Unix system developer tend to adopt simple and proven solutions and then
fix their issues. a developer of the MS-Windows system overengineers then
tries to the make the whole thing run
Wikipedia is a success because it has many good articles
experts on any field are such because the are recognized
if Wikipedia delivers a 'Wikipedia expertise score' which gains popularity then every person earning money thanks to his/her expertise will be interested in obtaining a good score. therefore let's use it to motivate experts to write and validate articles thanks to a challenging approach
a 'Wikipedia expertise score' will be delivered to every Wikipedia-account owner who writes at least an article. it will be a cryptographic certificates: any expert will be able to publish his score and anyone will be able to verify it because it will be digitally sealed-and-signed
on exact matters (sci and tech, not philosophy) the very fact that an expert validates an article which proves to be good (because any other expert will agree) has a value because it enables Wikipedia to allow, after a delay, a better 'expertise score' to the validating expert. therefore the first validator of a given article gains a whole lot of points, the next one gains less, and so on. the best way to be the first validator is to write the article, and any expert has available and public material for this, therefore he can do it and will earn (recognized expertise score) from doing so. from there any expert finding a factual error (validated as such by many others) will take a good fraction of the points earned, therefore the articles will be maintained and reviewed by a pool of score-seeking experts: their authors (trying to maintain them at a bulletproof stage) and other experts (trying to find errors in order to enhance their 'Wikipedia expertise score')
pitfalls :
an expert gang may falsely 'vote wrong' in order to rack points. but using the existing (today!) set of articles an automagic analysis of the
volume of information produced and its relative stability ('unpolluted'
status, age and amount of readers) the motivation and efficiency of all
their authors can be calculted ('scored'). therefore a software can already (right now)
establish a 'confidence score' for each already registered author. the first stage of this operation is therefore to deliver a score to each of them. they are of good will and will devise a way to deliver other certificates.
some people may sell expertise points by various means. I don't think that anyone will be able to benefit from those points in order to gain anything than spare time
to attract editors the project may in fact rate them thanks to their article's 'stability'
each article will have a status:
'raw' (or maybe 'vanilla'?), meaning 'last standard content' (any existing article has this 'raw' status)
'unpolluted', meaning 'free from any vandalism'
'validated', meaning that 'a Wikipedia commission of people knowing the field validated it'
'expertised', meaning that 'a world-known expert of the field checked it ok'
any Wikimedia visitor will be able to state in his profile that, upon reading, [s]he wants to obtain the last version of any article which reached a given status. if there is no such version the immediate 'lower' status will be published (this is recursive)
this will not in any way annoy the reader who does not care about all those darn article status:-) because the default (in the personal profile (preferences) of each registered user or for anonymous ones) will state 'raw'. moreover on each article displayed a new tab will offer access to the various other accessible versions
those various articles status will be expressed by cryptographic seals.
[...]
transitions bw statuses:
'unpolluted' status: any administrator will obtain a certificate in order to let him/her give the status 'unpolluted' to any article.
'validated' status: using the existing (today!) set of articles an automagic analysis of the volume of information produced and its relative stability ('unpolluted' status, age and amount of readers) the motivation and efficiency of all their authors can be calculted ('scored'). therefore a software can establish a 'confidence score' for each already registered author.
the administrators will use those scores and deliver certificates to the best authors. those certificates will be qualified by an attribute listing the name of the categories of expertise of their carrier (themes, for example 'mathematics' or 'geography'). those authors, in turn, will recognize some other authors (for example newcomers) as peers.
[... ]
'expertised' status:
in each category this first college of 'wpexperts' will be enabled to form a college in
order to elect world-known 'experts' of the field. the CA will produce certificates for them, with an 'expert' attribute storing the pertinent categories names. at first they may be not very interested in participating but as more and more will somewhat do emulation will raise their involvement (Wikipedia will benefit from it).
I would like to be able to do so but cannot devise a way to have this whole thing up without proper authentication. identification is not mandatory, an expert may act anonymously but we need a way to authenticate. do you have any idea about this?
> Don't even make logging-in mandatory.
yep, it isn't
> Let casual users make effortless edits, and depend on the rest of your suggestions to
> keep the quality high. Where would you set the default (not-logged-in) profile for
> browsing?
'raw' ('vanilla' may be a better term)
> If you go too strict, then you are damaging the wiki nature.
this will not in any way annoy the reader who does not care about all
those darn article status:-) because the default (in the personal
profile (preferences) of each registered user or for anonymous ones) will
state 'raw'. moreover on each article displayed a new tab will offer access
to the various other accessible versions
the user's preferences may also define which version (bleeding-edge or checked) of a any given article will be displayed by default.
in fact more than one status may be useful, for example unpolluted (no blatant crap)/validated (by Wikipedia experts, automatially detected thanks to the existinf base of articles)/expertized (by world-class experts, elected by Wikipedia experts, if necessary among them).
each Wikipedia article may have more than one status:
'raw', meaning 'last standard content' (any existing article has this
'raw' status)
'unpolluted', meaning 'free from any vandalism'
'validated', meaning that 'a Wikipedia commission of people knowing the
field validated it'
'expertised', meaning that 'a world-known expert of the field checked
it ok'
any Wikimedia visitor will be able to state in his profile that, upon
reading, [s]he wants to obtain the last version of any article which
reached a given status. if there is no such version the immediate
'lower' status will be published (this is recursive)
any Wikipedia contributor will carry only one Wikipedia (X.509v3) certificate, which
will store many attributes stating various useful parameters.
any administrator will obtain a certificate in order to let him/her give
the status 'unpolluted' to any article.
using the existing (today!) set of articles an automagic analysis of the volume of
information produced and its relative stability ('unpolluted' status, age
and amount of readers) can establish a 'confidence score' for each
author. the administrators will use those scores and deliver certificates
to the best authors. those certificates will be qualified by an attribute
(named 'wpexpert':-) ) listing the name of the categories of expertise of their
carrier (themes, for example 'mathematics' or 'geography').
avoid annoying anyone who likes the way Wikipedia works now
satisfy anyone who prefers reviewed articles
there is at least an approach for publishing various insurances on the Web:
origin (answer to the question who wrote this?),
integrity (do I read the exact information written or a tampered version?),
non-repudiation (can the author negate being the author?),
opinions (what do people trusted by me think of it?),
timestamping (when was this information published?),
automatic discovery of similar tastes (may I obtain the list of all informations new for me and appreciated by other Web user emitting opinions similar to mines?),
layering (may I automatically access preferably/only to information validated by a set of friends?)
> So if the soldiers aren't likely to fire on citizenry, why do so many people consider guns as necessary for keeping the govt in check?
to tackle the subtle difference between "the soldiers aren't likely to fire on citizenry" and "the soldiers will not fire on citizenry". moreover on a small scale (a few citizen against a local nut) soldiers may find wise to refuse shooting because some citizen have weapons
> resistance against an oppressive government is hopelessly obsolete in this day and age of technology and astonishing defence budgets
nope. again: heavy weaponry can only be used to destroy, not to control. the Red Army was very powerful 25 years ago (check the US defence budget, NATO budget...). they invaded Afghanistan using full power (men and weapons), without any humanitarian consideration. the old bunch of light weapons then owned by the local guys helped them to fight their way out of this, by ambushing in order to steal Soviet weapons. they received various equipments later, thanks to the very fact that they could prove their will to fight instead of simply vanish or surrender.
> The 'fully-equipped' English army hardly benefitted from the colossal gulf in capabilities that exists today between armed civilians and the military
using very heavy weapons implies very heavy casualties, which are not efficient to rule (instead of 'to destroy/kill') any country. as a ruler you can only use light weapons. to kill somewhat selectively various other approaches (create a famine, let an epidemic spread, build forced labor camps...) proved much more efficient. as a sidenote labor camps are not usable to control an armed population, all tyrants who used them disarmed the citizen before to do so (the other means have nearly nothing to do with weaponry)
> the English soldiers were completely surprised by the tactic of taking potshots out of trees - they considered it 'unsporting'
each war or even each battle conveys such surprises: the 'all was done as usual' syndrom is the exception, not the rule
> Regarding armies who refuse to hurt their peers - define 'peers'. Seems to me that all it takes is for the powers-that-be to dehumanise the 'enemy'
when 'the enemy' is another citizen many will think "I can't shoot because my brother/cousin/friend/wotever ('peer') is probably among them"
> There may well be more gunowners, though I doubt all of them would stand up and fight
enough is sufficient, all is luxury
> I wouldn't fancy my chances against an Apache gunship
piloted by... another citizen!
> Training counts too - I'd back a special-ops team against a civilian unit with 10 times as many members, every time.
every time a localized (time and space) fight occurs you will be right to do so. but over a long period and with the more realistic 1/1000 ratio (spec ops/armed civilians)...
> I doubt it'll ever actually happen, of course.
not against our own armies, but maybe against an invader
> This has happened even in non-democratic countries. e.g. China having to get soldiers from a different part of the country who would actually obey orders to attack protestors.
imho this happened, in modern times, ONLY (s/even/ONLY/) in non-democratic countries. better: the int'l public eye was strong enough to moderate the violence. my thesis is that armed (light weapons) citizen are a non-neglectable annoyance for an invader and a major pain for the first steps of a tyrant
> all sorts of tools make effective weapons.
granted, but a dedicated design is always more efficient and/or practical.
the very fact that some power tries to disarm citizen is an early warning sign
> [citizen] shooting down the A-bombs with their guns
we are talking about citizen fighting against gov (or 'legislature') abuse, not against something (gov or other) trying to simply kill everyone. ruling and killing does not imply the same means. ruling armed (light weapons) unwilling people is much more difficult than unarmed ones
> All those french Jets and Bombers defending the bastille bunker a quarter of a mile underground were no match for those semi-automatic private guns
we are talking about our democracies. if you really think that a nut willing to publicly kill hundreds of citizens in order to stay in place can be elected and stay president AND that most of the army will obey him/her and use heavy weaponry against other citizens, well... don't forget that AFAIK most (if not all) the troops sent against simple strikers _refused_ to shoot at them since approx 1890
the English army was fully-equipped, trained, and organised. then a 'bunch' of civilian fought against it after a tea party in Boston...
the French Armée Royale was very powerful. then a bunch of guys fought against it after a visit of the Bastille jail...
moreover any army in a democratic country is made of citizen who, especially during the last century, tend to refuse to harm their peers.
even a fully-equipped and trained soldier in a foreign country must, from time to time, go outside (quit his armored building or vehicle). therefore any hostile and armed citizen remains dangerous, and the super-duper-soldier is affraid. any modern army occupying a country (for example the Nazis during WW2) tries hard to confiscate all weapons as quickly as possible
> If you want to distribute to the masses you simply need a bunch of people that can upload more then they download
indeed. they can do it over time
> if you are stuck with ADSL people who can download at 100kb/s or more, but only upload at 15kb/s at best you naturally run into problems, even with bittorrent.
a problem fixed by the very behaviour of each serious user who downloads then lets the file on his disk (seeding it) 'till it reaches at last a few days there or a good (> 1) share ratio. it works because many users know that they benefit (reciprocally) from this behavior and also khow to cap their BT client upload speed in order to avoid clogging up their connection, therefore this behaviour does not induce disconfort. moreover hard disk space is cheap and many legally downloaded files are not simply useful for a few hours.
http://ikarios.com/bt/ documents http://nat.dyndns.org/, which seeds many torrents.
this is not JAET (Just Another Empty Tracker): all downloadable files are present. moreover there are many rare files
HTTP access via port 80 and the tracker on a high port (51181)
enjoy and if you have some resources please let your client seed after the download
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a critic of those "conclusions" (French).
Most French favor a step-by-step halt of the nuclear program (French), therefore EDF uses various little tricks in order to build the toy. The most funny trick is that we (the people) must help them decide without being informed because most pertinent information is kept secret. Moreover it seems that EDF will in fact decide, after the public debate, without any explanation. This is a sad joke, especially because some published information revealed potential problems (French).
I'm not against civil nuke...but the hell with lies and disinformation!
For scientific and technical matters this approach works because the very publication leads to an efficient peer review, and anyone can refute or rebut.
But outside of these categories some things presented as "facts" are pure and simple bullshit, for example because their authors deliberately omit important data, use distorted ways to relate or plainly lie. Therefore a pure 'fact' must be described by a witness, not by simply copy/pasting 'published' information.
There is a major and very dangerous confusion between the 'fact' that something is published and the 'factual' status of the information published. All efficient propagandists take gain of this.
More explicitly: after reading something presented as a fact and beginning with "According to a press release from the Agency For BlahBlahBlah (an apparently serious body): ...", many will forget that the 'fact' is the press release, not its content! They will memorize the 'information' delivered and label it "it's a fact, it's true".
Therefore anyone who thinks that (in non scientific or technical fields) only "published material" is factual must, in order to avoid relaying disinformation or misinformation, take care of his sources honesty and rigor.
I experienced such mess on an article published in Wikipedia fr: a press release published by a group controlled by an ONU agency was considered as a 'fact' (French) albeit anyone can demonstrate that its content, stating that a scientific study concluded that the Chernobyl accident will kill about 4000 people, is pure and simple bullshit (French): no work published, no authors, no peer review, results obtained in a very specific context and limited perimeter by unreliable methods (as stated in the report draft)...)
When an analysis of such a 'fact' arises I think that an encyclopedia must clearly state that the reported announcement is plain disinformation, and link to the demonstration.
There is a proposal to avoid this mess by informing the reader of the level of trust he choose, more or less directly, to give to the information source: WebDSign
The existing user accounts and articles history offers a way, through some automagic analysis, to detect existing 'Wikipedia experts'.
The analysis will calculate, for each existing user, an 'efficiency score' on each category based on the volume, age, audience and stability of his writings. On each category the one-per-thousand best writers (who produce good-and-stable articles) will be immediately promoted into some 'Wikipedia expert' status. Those experts will form the category's "council", able to 'promote' other users into the 'Wikipedia expert' status.
More at http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/
Server: Apache/2.0.50 (Fedora)
Hosted by in2net, who also offers MS-Windows boxes.
Keep up the good choices, Mr. Buxton!
[
> reputation system
Let's devise objectives and constraints.
At the present pace the 'Wikipedia expert' will soon be of value, therefore we may enable experts to be interested in enhancing Wikipedia articles in order to gain respect. This may enable us to build the reputation system, which will benefit to WP and to the experts.
> new or otherwise unreviewed articles
> note saying "This article has not been reviewed
Any visitor must be able to read the cutting-edge version ('unstable') of an article or a reviewed one. He must be able to configure this in his personal preference and, while reading, switch between versions by clicking on a tab. Some will prefer to only read reviewed articles while others like the way it works right now.
> As for the reputation system itself: Users' reputations would start at 0
The existing user accounts and articles history offers a way, through some automagic analysis, to detect existing 'Wikipedia experts'.
The analysis will calculate, for each existing user, an 'efficiency score' on each category based on the volume, age, audience and stability of his writings. On each category the one-per-thousand best writers (who produce good-and-stable articles) will be immediately promoted into some 'Wikipedia expert' status and form the category's council. The council will be able to 'promote' other users into the 'Wikipedia expert' status.
> gradually increase both with time and with each new contribution they make
And decrease upon error discovery (which will increase the 'score' of the discoverer), inviting anyone not only to create and update but also to fix (correct).
> Certain individuals -- certified scientists, professors, etc -- could also be given field-specific bonuses
Indeed. The council in charge of the category will probably be populated, immediately after its creation, by people knowing those recognized experts. The council will be able to invite and promote them into 'experts'. An expert will be able to deliver the ultimate seal of trust to an article belonging to his category.
On some discussed or non scientific matters we need a trust-system enabling anybody to 'elect' his own experts, or to give to some entity the right to select adequate experts.
> reputations will be decreased whenever an edit is completely reverted ... upon the new content validation. Indeed!
There is a way to implement all this: WebDSign-WP
> The people need to have their point of view changed. The people need objective information instead of the usual bullshit. The IAEA (ONU's agency for civil nuclear energy), for example, is full of lies. They even declared in 200509 that only 4000 people (grand total) have and will die from the Chernobyl disaster. I tried to understand this figure: no published scientific work (only draft reports with no clear author for each assertion), the '4000' figure is not written in it as such and the corresponding approximation stated is only related to cancers to come in a given subgroup (not the grand total!), the model used (Hiroshima - Nagasaki) is inadequate (high external radiation during a brief period, albeit most Chernobyl's victims receive low radiation, with a fair internal (food) fraction, for a long period), the population analyzed is a subset (mainly Russians) and not qualified (therefore probably not representative and insufficient), the very report states that his results are highly inaccurate (lack of good data, inadequate model, other morbidity specific to the context...), the whole stuff is published as an OMS work albeit this organization is in fact tied to the IAEA for anything related to nuclear (OMS just cannot publish anything not approved by IAEA), during the official report presentation the OMS guy responsible for it did not even try to show that the model used is adequate and said that the published figure was coined by the "public relations" department and not by the scientists... I can carry on but you get the picture. The whole stuff, published thru the media by some "The people need to have their point of view changed." sort of technocrats, gives "4000 people died and will die, period". This is the way they think: "We cannot anymore decide without informing anyone, but the average citizen is stupid, let's feed him/her with some lies in order to continue doing our stuff". Let's refuse and resist 'till some objective and clear information becomes available!
the core MS-Windows system has high-level libraries used by all Microsoft applications, therefore (in theory) any software developer working in a Microsoft team is not poised to develop whatever was already coined by another. they cooperate
many functions used by many applications (for example MS-Office) are therefore more or less ready-to-go, maybe even already loaded in the memory occupied by the operating system, when you invoke them. this speeds things up
under a free Unix the people developing system and applications rarely talk to each other. the system provides much less high-level functions (above the libc, X) than any modern MS-Windows and the only teams stuffing more factorized high-level code inside it are working on toolkits (KDE, GTK...).
note: one may argue that those libs are user-space things, please note that I use 'system' in the broad sense
this is, at first glance, less efficient than MS-Windows because there is no central authority pumping functions into a single library used by all apps, therefore many applications don't use them. any given desktop will consequently probably use many libraries providing the same services, therefore many free applications come with their own code to do things already done by other ones.
the MS-Windows approach is theoretically wonderful, mainly because less memory is occupied by various codes doing the same thing.
but it leads to various pitfalls. here are some not neglectable ones:
the bloated high-level services provided by MS-Windows are less stable when the machine simultaneously runs many softwares, thanks to awful side effects spawned by heavy multi-layered codes. therefore most users try to run, on a given box, as few services as possible... loosing a good part of the factorization benefits
from my experience the Unix approach is more and more efficient as time passes. it now provides an environment more flexible, easy to maintain and extend, which extracts more useful power from the hardware
it even gains, after a while, the benefit of the 'central library' approach because efficient and stable libraries tend to gain audience among developers, providing a common ground a posteriori (created for a given client code, then evaluated and adopted for others). on this particular matter the efficient way to do thing wins again: don't try to predefine the whole solution, keep it simple, progress slowly, prefer field-proven solutions
this somewhat reminds me of the 'forked childs' classic Unix trick, for a piece of software, to honor requests for each request: run an instance for each request. this means that a bug will probably scrap a request but not block/stall the whole service, which is a very simple and efficient way to achieve crude but often sufficient software-fault tolerance, albeit it is was ressource-hungry. I write was because it is much more less a system hog now, thanks to some low-level enhancements (started w vfork, copy-on-write and such) conceived after this approach
a Unix system developer tend to adopt simple and proven solutions and then fix their issues. a developer of the MS-Windows system overengineers then tries to the make the whole thing run
from my point of view the choice is a no brainer
WebDSign: thrust the Web by trust
WebDSign: thrust the Web by trust
experts on any field are such because the are recognized
if Wikipedia delivers a 'Wikipedia expertise score' which gains popularity then every person earning money thanks to his/her expertise will be interested in obtaining a good score. therefore let's use it to motivate experts to write and validate articles thanks to a challenging approach
a 'Wikipedia expertise score' will be delivered to every Wikipedia-account owner who writes at least an article. it will be a cryptographic certificates: any expert will be able to publish his score and anyone will be able to verify it because it will be digitally sealed-and-signed
on exact matters (sci and tech, not philosophy) the very fact that an expert validates an article which proves to be good (because any other expert will agree) has a value because it enables Wikipedia to allow, after a delay, a better 'expertise score' to the validating expert. therefore the first validator of a given article gains a whole lot of points, the next one gains less, and so on. the best way to be the first validator is to write the article, and any expert has available and public material for this, therefore he can do it and will earn (recognized expertise score) from doing so. from there any expert finding a factual error (validated as such by many others) will take a good fraction of the points earned, therefore the articles will be maintained and reviewed by a pool of score-seeking experts: their authors (trying to maintain them at a bulletproof stage) and other experts (trying to find errors in order to enhance their 'Wikipedia expertise score')
pitfalls :
- an expert gang may falsely 'vote wrong' in order to rack points. but using the existing (today!) set of articles an automagic analysis of the
volume of information produced and its relative stability ('unpolluted'
status, age and amount of readers) the motivation and efficiency of all
their authors can be calculted ('scored'). therefore a software can already (right now)
establish a 'confidence score' for each already registered author. the first stage of this operation is therefore to deliver a score to each of them. they are of good will and will devise a way to deliver other certificates.
- some people may sell expertise points by various means. I don't think that anyone will be able to benefit from those points in order to gain anything than spare time
check http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/#wikipediaeach article will have a status:
any Wikimedia visitor will be able to state in his profile that, upon reading, [s]he wants to obtain the last version of any article which reached a given status. if there is no such version the immediate 'lower' status will be published (this is recursive)
this will not in any way annoy the reader who does not care about all those darn article status :-) because the default (in the personal profile (preferences) of each registered user or for anonymous ones) will state 'raw'. moreover on each article displayed a new tab will offer access to the various other accessible versions
those various articles status will be expressed by cryptographic seals. [...]
transitions bw statuses:
'unpolluted' status: any administrator will obtain a certificate in order to let him/her give the status 'unpolluted' to any article.
'validated' status: using the existing (today!) set of articles an automagic analysis of the volume of information produced and its relative stability ('unpolluted' status, age and amount of readers) the motivation and efficiency of all their authors can be calculted ('scored'). therefore a software can establish a 'confidence score' for each already registered author.
the administrators will use those scores and deliver certificates to the best authors. those certificates will be qualified by an attribute listing the name of the categories of expertise of their carrier (themes, for example 'mathematics' or 'geography'). those authors, in turn, will recognize some other authors (for example newcomers) as peers. [ ... ]
'expertised' status: in each category this first college of 'wpexperts' will be enabled to form a college in order to elect world-known 'experts' of the field. the CA will produce certificates for them, with an 'expert' attribute storing the pertinent categories names. at first they may be not very interested in participating but as more and more will somewhat do emulation will raise their involvement (Wikipedia will benefit from it).
more at http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/ (this is a generic method, the WP discussion is at http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/#wikipedia)
I would like to be able to do so but cannot devise a way to have this whole thing up without proper authentication. identification is not mandatory, an expert may act anonymously but we need a way to authenticate. do you have any idea about this?
> Don't even make logging-in mandatory.
yep, it isn't
> Let casual users make effortless edits, and depend on the rest of your suggestions to > keep the quality high. Where would you set the default (not-logged-in) profile for > browsing?
'raw' ('vanilla' may be a better term)
> If you go too strict, then you are damaging the wiki nature.
this will not in any way annoy the reader who does not care about all those darn article status :-) because the default (in the personal
profile (preferences) of each registered user or for anonymous ones) will
state 'raw'. moreover on each article displayed a new tab will offer access
to the various other accessible versions
th for the ideas, I modified the published proposal accordingly
the user's preferences may also define which version (bleeding-edge or checked) of a any given article will be displayed by default.
in fact more than one status may be useful, for example unpolluted (no blatant crap)/validated (by Wikipedia experts, automatially detected thanks to the existinf base of articles)/expertized (by world-class experts, elected by Wikipedia experts, if necessary among them).
see http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/#wikipediaWiki pedia
I wonder how the authors of such a new 'variant' may access (read? write?) to the Wikipedia databases
each Wikipedia article may have more than one status:
any Wikimedia visitor will be able to state in his profile that, upon reading, [s]he wants to obtain the last version of any article which reached a given status. if there is no such version the immediate 'lower' status will be published (this is recursive)
any Wikipedia contributor will carry only one Wikipedia (X.509v3) certificate, which will store many attributes stating various useful parameters.
any administrator will obtain a certificate in order to let him/her give the status 'unpolluted' to any article.
using the existing (today!) set of articles an automagic analysis of the volume of information produced and its relative stability ('unpolluted' status, age and amount of readers) can establish a 'confidence score' for each author. the administrators will use those scores and deliver certificates to the best authors. those certificates will be qualified by an attribute (named 'wpexpert' :-) ) listing the name of the categories of expertise of their
carrier (themes, for example 'mathematics' or 'geography').
more info at http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/
there is at least an approach for publishing various insurances on the Web:
the detail is at http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/ (potential non-intrusive application to Wikipedia: http://www.makarevitch.org/webdsign/#wikipedia)
beware: chrt'ing a badly implemented application may provoke a kernel hang
--
WebDSign: thrust the Web by trust
to tackle the subtle difference between "the soldiers aren't likely to fire on citizenry" and "the soldiers will not fire on citizenry". moreover on a small scale (a few citizen against a local nut) soldiers may find wise to refuse shooting because some citizen have weapons
> resistance against an oppressive government is hopelessly obsolete in this day and age of technology and astonishing defence budgets
nope. again: heavy weaponry can only be used to destroy, not to control. the Red Army was very powerful 25 years ago (check the US defence budget, NATO budget...). they invaded Afghanistan using full power (men and weapons), without any humanitarian consideration. the old bunch of light weapons then owned by the local guys helped them to fight their way out of this, by ambushing in order to steal Soviet weapons. they received various equipments later, thanks to the very fact that they could prove their will to fight instead of simply vanish or surrender.
using very heavy weapons implies very heavy casualties, which are not efficient to rule (instead of 'to destroy/kill') any country. as a ruler you can only use light weapons. to kill somewhat selectively various other approaches (create a famine, let an epidemic spread, build forced labor camps...) proved much more efficient. as a sidenote labor camps are not usable to control an armed population, all tyrants who used them disarmed the citizen before to do so (the other means have nearly nothing to do with weaponry)
> the English soldiers were completely surprised by the tactic of taking potshots out of trees - they considered it 'unsporting'
each war or even each battle conveys such surprises: the 'all was done as usual' syndrom is the exception, not the rule
> Regarding armies who refuse to hurt their peers - define 'peers'. Seems to me that all it takes is for the powers-that-be to dehumanise the 'enemy'
when 'the enemy' is another citizen many will think "I can't shoot because my brother/cousin/friend/wotever ('peer') is probably among them"
enough is sufficient, all is luxury
> I wouldn't fancy my chances against an Apache gunship
piloted by... another citizen!
> Training counts too - I'd back a special-ops team against a civilian unit with 10 times as many members, every time.
every time a localized (time and space) fight occurs you will be right to do so. but over a long period and with the more realistic 1/1000 ratio (spec ops/armed civilians)...
> I doubt it'll ever actually happen, of course.
not against our own armies, but maybe against an invader
imho this happened, in modern times, ONLY (s/even/ONLY/) in non-democratic countries. better: the int'l public eye was strong enough to moderate the violence. my thesis is that armed (light weapons) citizen are a non-neglectable annoyance for an invader and a major pain for the first steps of a tyrant
> all sorts of tools make effective weapons.
granted, but a dedicated design is always more efficient and/or practical.
the very fact that some power tries to disarm citizen is an early warning sign
we are talking about citizen fighting against gov (or 'legislature') abuse, not against something (gov or other) trying to simply kill everyone. ruling and killing does not imply the same means. ruling armed (light weapons) unwilling people is much more difficult than unarmed ones
> All those french Jets and Bombers defending the bastille bunker a quarter of a mile underground were no match for those semi-automatic private guns
we are talking about our democracies. if you really think that a nut willing to publicly kill hundreds of citizens in order to stay in place can be elected and stay president AND that most of the army will obey him/her and use heavy weaponry against other citizens, well... don't forget that AFAIK most (if not all) the troops sent against simple strikers _refused_ to shoot at them since approx 1890
the English army was fully-equipped, trained, and organised. then a 'bunch' of civilian fought against it after a tea party in Boston...
the French Armée Royale was very powerful. then a bunch of guys fought against it after a visit of the Bastille jail...
moreover any army in a democratic country is made of citizen who, especially during the last century, tend to refuse to harm their peers.
even a fully-equipped and trained soldier in a foreign country must, from time to time, go outside (quit his armored building or vehicle). therefore any hostile and armed citizen remains dangerous, and the super-duper-soldier is affraid. any modern army occupying a country (for example the Nazis during WW2) tries hard to confiscate all weapons as quickly as possible
the machines seem more snappy than with a 2.4
hints: IBM X31 laptop under Debian
indeed. they can do it over time
> if you are stuck with ADSL people who can download at 100kb/s or more, but only upload at 15kb/s at best you naturally run into problems, even with bittorrent.
a problem fixed by the very behaviour of each serious user who downloads then lets the file on his disk (seeding it) 'till it reaches at last a few days there or a good (> 1) share ratio. it works because many users know that they benefit (reciprocally) from this behavior and also khow to cap their BT client upload speed in order to avoid clogging up their connection, therefore this behaviour does not induce disconfort. moreover hard disk space is cheap and many legally downloaded files are not simply useful for a few hours.
-- 150+ hosted torrents of free software
http://ikarios.com/bt/ documents http://nat.dyndns.org/, which seeds many torrents. this is not JAET (Just Another Empty Tracker): all downloadable files are present. moreover there are many rare files HTTP access via port 80 and the tracker on a high port (51181) enjoy and if you have some resources please let your client seed after the download