A similar satire of the left wing would be the south park episode where Christopher Reeve is cracking open fetuses and sucking out the insides for a cure. They are not suggesting that embryonic stem-cell research is murder (a right wing position), but rather they are exposing how laughable the right wing position is.
The greatest part about that episode was that it actually was a satire of *both* sides of the argument in one swoop.
On one hand, they were exaggerating the right wing position that "stem cell research is murder" as you said.
And on the other, they were exaggerating the position that stem cell research is going to magically produce wonder cures for everything, by having his progress be so rapid and extreme once he started using "stem cell therapy" (slllurrp).
And wasn't Mr. John Flip-flop Kerry an advocate of disarming Iraq?
Yes. First step in disarming: confirm that they have or have not complied with disarming requirements.
Bush cuts the inspections off short, Kerry complains. Just like he said he would on oct 9 2002 when he gave a senate speech detailing why he signed the war power authorization.
Hello? I read and understood your argument perfectly. It seems like it was *my* comment that didn't make its way through *your* thick skull, and not vice versa.
Ranking polls get more information from the people voting PERIOD. It doesn't matter if you're trying to pick a winner or just list the distribution. If you had a slightly larger brain perhaps you would have realized that.
In your case, your vote gets transfered to your 3rd, 4th etc preferences. If _all_ of you preferences have already been eliminiated, only then is your vote eliminated. Put another way, your vote is eliminated when none of the candidates you voted for are in the running.
Well, fine, but you're still missing the point.
The idea is that there are only 3 "viable" choices at this point: Democrat, Libertarian, and Republican. The race is very close, and only one of them is going to win. You prefer Libertarian first and Republican second. You do not want the Democrats to win.
If you vote Libertarian, the fact that you didn't vote Republican first could cause the republicans to be eliminated (this is the "spoiler effect" argument basically). If democrats are stronger than libertarians, then they'll win.
It's possible to set up a situation where if you vote 1) L 2) R, then the democrats win, but if you vote 1) R 2) L, then the republicans win. THis happens because the republicans are eliminated in the first example, and your 2nd-choice for them never gets counted.
It's the same thing as the spoiler effect, effectively; an incentive to vote for someone other than your first choice first so that the "worst of the evils" doesn't get elected instead.
That's the point.
Ps: I'm actually an IRV supporter. It's just good to understand the arguments against it.
You're missing the point. The slashdot polls still only show people's "first choice." An alternative method that allows people to choose more than one or to rank would give a more accurate picture of people's opinions.
since a majority vote obviously isn't good enough?
A majority vote would be just fine.
But our current system is a *plurality vote* which is a much different beast.
PS: "Electoral College" isn't in the same category as IRV/Condorcet in terms of voting system choices. You can have any of those voting systems with or without an electoral college.
This is advocacy. The electionmethods.org website has been up and saying the same thing for YEARS. Why does it suddenly become a news blurb? And more importantly, why does the news blurb only link to one side of the issue and not any web sites arguing for IRV over Condorcet?
(It can be done, by the way. Condorcet arguably gives more of an incentive to vote strategically than IRV, for example.)
According to a bunch of arbitrarily defined mathematical "criteria" for voting methods.
it can end up selecting the candidate who does not have the most votes
This doesn't even make sense in the context of a ranking system. How do you determine which candidate has the "most votes"?
Educate yourself about the dangers of IRV and the many superior alternatives!
At the same time, you should educate yourself about the dangers of said "superior alternatives". For example, Condorcet (the most common voting method touted above IRV) suffers from some pretty serious strategy problems.
Anyway, the problem with software patents is that with software, the line between "idea" and "implementation" is incredibly wide and fuzzy. This is because, once you have an idea to do *something* in code, there are very few different ways to actually go about doing it. Oh sure, there are different algorithms you could use for each step -- but more often than not software patents don't even get that detailed. All they seem to do is list what each step does, not how exactly it does it, and that's good enough for the USPO.
The other reason that the line between software implementations and ideas is so blurry is because there's never a physical invention. All you're doing is writing down instructions for a machine to follow. In essence, you're just stating your *idea* in a way that the machine understands.
For example, if you're to tell any semi-competent programmer who's never heard of Amazon.com that you wanted to make a web site that lets users buy an item with only one click, the great majority of them will come up with the same basic implementation -- store in a database all the information needed to make a purchase for that user, track which user is logged in, when the button is pressed cross reference the user into the database and automatically send the information through the purchasing mechanism. There really is no other reasonable way to go about implementing this kind of thing. Obviously, there's details depending on exactly how their database is set up, but it doesn't matter. The patent, as it's written and accepted by the USPO, effectively covers any attempt to do this sort of straightforward manouver.
Even if this programmer who's never heard of amazon comes up with the idea all by themselves they can't make a product that uses it because amazon has the "rights" to the idea.
Contrast this with an actual, physical invention -- say, one-button 4 wheel drive in an explorer. Now this is an idea that requires a lot of detail to hash out and get patented. And there's a lot of ways to go about doing it, none of which are very obvious. To get it patented, you have to have an electromechanical system pretty much designed that *works*, and that requires a lot of R&D.
To get the equivalent software patent accepted, all you need is the idea, and a rudimentary knowledge of how computer systems are set up. You practically don't have to do *any* R&D at all. And ideas are supposedly not patentable but for some reason high level software implementations are.
---
Ok, that answers why software patents may be bad philosophically, but you wanted to know why they're bad practically? Well, because it's so easy to "develop" a software patent, companies create thousands and thousands of patents as fast as they can to try to "stake out" their territory on the IP map. All that matters is that they were the first to be granted the patent, and no one else had used that particular technique yet. They may not have been the first to think of it, the first to R&D it (if they even did any R&D), or even the first to file for a patent! But they get a temporary monopoly on that new technology and that stifles innovation.
It also hurts the little guy -- smaller companies don't have the resources to push patents through with the same efficiency *or* to take on the big boys when patent disputes come into play.
Finally: Capitalism vs Socialism You think that having the government grant you a temporary monopoly in a certain area is "capitalism" and letting the market work for itself is "socialism"? Wow. Just wow.
How good? In many cases better than proprietary solutions.
And you arrived at this conclusion exactly how?
By noticing several cases in which the quality of a specific article in wikipedia is better than the quality of the same article in a traditional encyclopedia? The logic here really isn't that hard.
For example: if there was a list of errors in a traditional encyclopedia that were shown to be improved upon in wikipedia, this would demonstrate that "in many cases, wikipedia is better than proprietary solutions."
Oh, but then you spout this crap out:
Oh, and please don't drag the tired list of errors in Britannica, and trot out the "we fixed those errors in Wikipedia!" party line. No comparable list of errors exists for Wikipedia-- because nobody's even *trying* to get any sort of metrics on how good or bad the content is.
Beautiful debate tactic, there. Challenge a claim, then preemtively throw out evidence in very strong support of that claim, without actually describing why that evidence should be thrown out. Oh, but make sure to throw in prases such as "tired" "trot out" and "party line" to try to cover up your inability to reason. Finally, change the topic to a red herring about having a "comparable list" for wikipedia, which has nothing to do with the original claim.
Just beautiful.
I'd almost think this was a well crafted troll, if I believed that you had the mental capacity to pull it off as such.
The lesson that all these Wikipedians seem to be trying to teach me is that, if there is a problem with Wikipedia, it's *my* fault, not Wikipedia's.
This statement has nothing to do with anything I wrote in the post to which you're replying.
I'm sorry, but it's Wikipedia that advertises itself as being better than real encyclopedias, on the supposed grounds that it allows anybody to create and edit articles at any time.
Where do they advertize themselves as such?
That is a fantastic claim, one which requires a lot of evidence to be believed.
This is true. If anyone claimed that wikipedia is of a decidedly higher quality than traditional encyclopedias, then the burden of proof would be on them to demonstrate the claim.
Similarly, anyone who claims that wikipedia is *far below* the quality of traditional encyclopedias has the burden of proof on *them* to demonstrate the claim.
I would propose the following metric to determine the quality of "Wikipedia" vs traditional encyclopedias: First, create a list of "encyclopedic" topics, which are topics that the vast majority of "traditional" encyclopedias include articles on. Then, rate each encyclopedia (both traditional ones and Wikipedia) for each topic area based on completeness and accuracy.
The reason I propose this particular metric is due to the fact that most criticism of Wikipedia seems to be directed at so-called "stub" articles or obscure little bits of info that no real world encyclopedia would even mention, unfairly biasing things against wikipedia due to its wider scope. From what I've seen, wikipedia seems to cover the core "encyclopedic" range of topics quite well.
So wiki considers stubs, talks and redirects as articles. Which rather makes my point.
You're pulling some sort of odd bait and switch here. Your point was that most of the material on wiki is stub-quality, and therefore that makes it less useful than a traditional encyclopedia. My response was that the vast majority of those stub and talk pages are things that'd never be in an encyclopedia to begin with. Your respose to that is that wikipedia includes stubs and talk pages in its article count? Forget bait-and-switch, this is just non-sequitur.
In addition, there seems to be an average of between 10 and 30 edits to the legitimate articles. Is that even enough to get the broad facts right?
I don't know, you tell me. It seems like the majority of pages *do* get the broad facts right.
My point is that thousands of people make vague, unsubstantiated statements on wikipedia every day. That's not the same as hard facts, and its not valuable. I'm not saying that no article on wiki is a good as a traditional encyclopaedia, just that the vast majority currently are not, which is rather the point.
You're saying all this without substantiating any of it, which is not very valuable.
Now translate that to Wikipedia and select something that you want to influence. "Windows LongDredgeUphillWarrior 2043 is the best due to it's powerful features - etc". How much would it cost you to hire 10 people to 'maintain' this information for a year?
Here's what would probably happen in wikipedia:
1) These people would post this article. 2) Most people using wikipedia would recognize it as violating NPOV (neutral point of view) 3) The people editing would change the article to be more NPOV. 4) The hired "maintainers" would change it back. 5) Other people on wikipedia would change it back again. 6) An "edit war" would ensue, with the page rapidly being edited back and forth. 7) Someone would bring the edit war to the attention of a moderator. 8) The moderator would lock the page -- and put a disclaimer at the top noting that it was locked -- until the cause for the edit war was hashed out between the participating parties 9) It would eventually be determined that one or more of the "Maintatiners" were putting in the NPOV material on purpose. 10) These "maintainers" would be banned (by ip address), and the article would be deleted or unlocked (depending on its usefulness as an article) 11) Repeat until all the "maintainers" are banned.
The system works because there are more "good guys" than "bad guys", effectively.
what that system has currently produced is a large number of articles which are so short as to be scarcely worth the name, a large number of articles which include partially/wholly untrue sections and a small number of really great articles.
Two things:
1) A lot of the articles that are "so short as to be scarecely worth the name" are on topics that would never have been covered by a traditional encyclopedia. Such "stub" articles probably shouldn't be counted in an evaluation of Wikipedia's merit unless they are of a topic that definitely should be included in any encyclopedia.
2) It's true that a lot of articles have partially or wholly untrue sections -- but this is very true of traditional encyclopedias as well. If you're going to argue that wikipedia is not as good as a traditional encyclopedia, then you should hold it to the same standard as a traditional encyclopedia when making that judgement -- not to some theoretically perfect all-correct-information standard.
Until the wikipedia consists largely of verified information, its value remains greatly diminished.
Define "verified information." Thousands of people edit and verify the information on wikipedia every day. Compare, again, to a handful of writers and editors in a traditional encyclopedia. Why do people necessarily trust the later more?
Another problem is I cannot cite Wikipedia in my reports or papers. I can certainly cite Britannica. And most schools have subscriptions to EB anyway.
You can certainly cite wikipedia.... The key is to include the exact date and time you are viewing the article you are citing, as articles can change constantly. This works, because wikipedia keeps a history of all changes to the artilcle, so someone reading your paper could easily go back and look at the exact page you cited from.
In fact, this makes citing from wikipedia more reliable than citing from most web pages, as most web pages can also change consistantly but don't keep histories of the changes (and the Wayback Machine's coverage is sometimes spotty).
Anyway, when I went to school, citing from any encyclopedia was looked down on, as encyclopedias were meant to be introductions to a topic, and we were to do our research from more primary sources.
Oh, and please don't drag the tired list of errors in Britannica, and trot out the "we fixed those errors in Wikipedia!" party line. No comparable list of errors exists for Wikipedia
I tend to think that the burden of proof is on the wikipedia condemners to show that it's decidedly *worse* than proprietary solutions.
because nobody's even *trying* to get any sort of metrics on how good or bad the content is.
1) Do those metrics exist for traditional encyclopedias?
2) Why don't *you* try to make those metrics, if they're such a concern to you?
Wikipedia's "stub" articles aside, traditional encyclopedias seem just as -- if not more -- likely to have errors / omissions as Wikipedia does. People always complain about its format and how "limiting" it is -- but no one has actually demonstrated that it's more limiting than a traditional encyclopedia.
It's like it's taken as an unquestionable assumption. Well I for one question it.
I've personally enjoyed owning tube amps on and off - the sound warmth, whether it be psychological or real, is definitely different then solid state amps.
Oh, it's definitely real. It's called "distortion."
Slashdot Mirror
Funny that you put "elite" in quotes, as no one actually said, or even implied, that only elite people knew the issues.
A similar satire of the left wing would be the south park episode where Christopher Reeve is cracking open fetuses and sucking out the insides for a cure. They are not suggesting that embryonic stem-cell research is murder (a right wing position), but rather they are exposing how laughable the right wing position is.
:)
The greatest part about that episode was that it actually was a satire of *both* sides of the argument in one swoop.
On one hand, they were exaggerating the right wing position that "stem cell research is murder" as you said.
And on the other, they were exaggerating the position that stem cell research is going to magically produce wonder cures for everything, by having his progress be so rapid and extreme once he started using "stem cell therapy" (slllurrp).
Those guys rule
... you can use iPods with the PC. What's this about "critical mass"?
Mr Cheney, you and the president *must* have more important things to do than posting on slashdot!
Mr Bush, is that you?
And wasn't Mr. John Flip-flop Kerry an advocate of disarming Iraq?
Yes. First step in disarming: confirm that they have or have not complied with disarming requirements.
Bush cuts the inspections off short, Kerry complains. Just like he said he would on oct 9 2002 when he gave a senate speech detailing why he signed the war power authorization.
He has not flip flopped.
Hello? I read and understood your argument perfectly. It seems like it was *my* comment that didn't make its way through *your* thick skull, and not vice versa.
Ranking polls get more information from the people voting PERIOD. It doesn't matter if you're trying to pick a winner or just list the distribution. If you had a slightly larger brain perhaps you would have realized that.
Jesus christ.
It wasn't the point of the examples given!...
No, it was pretty much the point.
In your case, your vote gets transfered to your 3rd, 4th etc preferences. If _all_ of you preferences have already been eliminiated, only then is your vote eliminated. Put another way, your vote is eliminated when none of the candidates you voted for are in the running.
Well, fine, but you're still missing the point.
The idea is that there are only 3 "viable" choices at this point: Democrat, Libertarian, and Republican. The race is very close, and only one of them is going to win. You prefer Libertarian first and Republican second. You do not want the Democrats to win.
If you vote Libertarian, the fact that you didn't vote Republican first could cause the republicans to be eliminated (this is the "spoiler effect" argument basically). If democrats are stronger than libertarians, then they'll win.
It's possible to set up a situation where if you vote 1) L 2) R, then the democrats win, but if you vote 1) R 2) L, then the republicans win. THis happens because the republicans are eliminated in the first example, and your 2nd-choice for them never gets counted.
It's the same thing as the spoiler effect, effectively; an incentive to vote for someone other than your first choice first so that the "worst of the evils" doesn't get elected instead.
That's the point.
Ps: I'm actually an IRV supporter. It's just good to understand the arguments against it.
The example is completely erroneous. If I ranked:
1. Libertarian
2. Republican
Then my libertarian vote would be transferred to the republican pile, and I most certainly wouldn't have helped the Democrat win. Simple.
No, not if the republicans were eliminated first. Then your vote wouldn't be transferred anywhere if the libs lost next. I think that's the point.
You're missing the point. The slashdot polls still only show people's "first choice." An alternative method that allows people to choose more than one or to rank would give a more accurate picture of people's opinions.
since a majority vote obviously isn't good enough?
A majority vote would be just fine.
But our current system is a *plurality vote* which is a much different beast.
PS: "Electoral College" isn't in the same category as IRV/Condorcet in terms of voting system choices. You can have any of those voting systems with or without an electoral college.
What happens if that person doesn't exist?
Suddenly it's not a one sentence explanation anymore. And worse, there isn't only one way to deal with that situation.
Most people use Schwartz Sequential Dropping, but I personally would finish an ambiguous condorcet with IRV.
This is advocacy. The electionmethods.org website has been up and saying the same thing for YEARS. Why does it suddenly become a news blurb? And more importantly, why does the news blurb only link to one side of the issue and not any web sites arguing for IRV over Condorcet?
(It can be done, by the way. Condorcet arguably gives more of an incentive to vote strategically than IRV, for example.)
IRV is the worst of all of them
According to a bunch of arbitrarily defined mathematical "criteria" for voting methods.
it can end up selecting the candidate who does not have the most votes
This doesn't even make sense in the context of a ranking system. How do you determine which candidate has the "most votes"?
Educate yourself about the dangers of IRV and the many superior alternatives!
At the same time, you should educate yourself about the dangers of said "superior alternatives". For example, Condorcet (the most common voting method touted above IRV) suffers from some pretty serious strategy problems.
Man, that story *needs* to be optioned as a screenplay. As long as someone can come up with a good ending for it...
But it would work brilliantly as a suspense film.
Care to link to your patents?
Anyway, the problem with software patents is that with software, the line between "idea" and "implementation" is incredibly wide and fuzzy. This is because, once you have an idea to do *something* in code, there are very few different ways to actually go about doing it. Oh sure, there are different algorithms you could use for each step -- but more often than not software patents don't even get that detailed. All they seem to do is list what each step does, not how exactly it does it, and that's good enough for the USPO.
The other reason that the line between software implementations and ideas is so blurry is because there's never a physical invention. All you're doing is writing down instructions for a machine to follow. In essence, you're just stating your *idea* in a way that the machine understands.
For example, if you're to tell any semi-competent programmer who's never heard of Amazon.com that you wanted to make a web site that lets users buy an item with only one click, the great majority of them will come up with the same basic implementation -- store in a database all the information needed to make a purchase for that user, track which user is logged in, when the button is pressed cross reference the user into the database and automatically send the information through the purchasing mechanism. There really is no other reasonable way to go about implementing this kind of thing. Obviously, there's details depending on exactly how their database is set up, but it doesn't matter. The patent, as it's written and accepted by the USPO, effectively covers any attempt to do this sort of straightforward manouver.
Even if this programmer who's never heard of amazon comes up with the idea all by themselves they can't make a product that uses it because amazon has the "rights" to the idea.
Contrast this with an actual, physical invention -- say, one-button 4 wheel drive in an explorer. Now this is an idea that requires a lot of detail to hash out and get patented. And there's a lot of ways to go about doing it, none of which are very obvious. To get it patented, you have to have an electromechanical system pretty much designed that *works*, and that requires a lot of R&D.
To get the equivalent software patent accepted, all you need is the idea, and a rudimentary knowledge of how computer systems are set up. You practically don't have to do *any* R&D at all. And ideas are supposedly not patentable but for some reason high level software implementations are.
---
Ok, that answers why software patents may be bad philosophically, but you wanted to know why they're bad practically? Well, because it's so easy to "develop" a software patent, companies create thousands and thousands of patents as fast as they can to try to "stake out" their territory on the IP map. All that matters is that they were the first to be granted the patent, and no one else had used that particular technique yet. They may not have been the first to think of it, the first to R&D it (if they even did any R&D), or even the first to file for a patent! But they get a temporary monopoly on that new technology and that stifles innovation.
It also hurts the little guy -- smaller companies don't have the resources to push patents through with the same efficiency *or* to take on the big boys when patent disputes come into play.
Finally:
Capitalism vs Socialism
You think that having the government grant you a temporary monopoly in a certain area is "capitalism" and letting the market work for itself is "socialism"? Wow. Just wow.
How good? In many cases better than proprietary solutions.
And you arrived at this conclusion exactly how?
By noticing several cases in which the quality of a specific article in wikipedia is better than the quality of the same article in a traditional encyclopedia? The logic here really isn't that hard.
For example: if there was a list of errors in a traditional encyclopedia that were shown to be improved upon in wikipedia, this would demonstrate that "in many cases, wikipedia is better than proprietary solutions."
Oh, but then you spout this crap out:
Oh, and please don't drag the tired list of errors in Britannica, and trot out the "we fixed those errors in Wikipedia!" party line. No comparable list of errors exists for Wikipedia-- because nobody's even *trying* to get any sort of metrics on how good or bad the content is.
Beautiful debate tactic, there. Challenge a claim, then preemtively throw out evidence in very strong support of that claim, without actually describing why that evidence should be thrown out. Oh, but make sure to throw in prases such as "tired" "trot out" and "party line" to try to cover up your inability to reason. Finally, change the topic to a red herring about having a "comparable list" for wikipedia, which has nothing to do with the original claim.
Just beautiful.
I'd almost think this was a well crafted troll, if I believed that you had the mental capacity to pull it off as such.
The lesson that all these Wikipedians seem to be trying to teach me is that, if there is a problem with Wikipedia, it's *my* fault, not Wikipedia's.
This statement has nothing to do with anything I wrote in the post to which you're replying.
I'm sorry, but it's Wikipedia that advertises itself as being better than real encyclopedias, on the supposed grounds that it allows anybody to create and edit articles at any time.
Where do they advertize themselves as such?
That is a fantastic claim, one which requires a lot of evidence to be believed.
This is true. If anyone claimed that wikipedia is of a decidedly higher quality than traditional encyclopedias, then the burden of proof would be on them to demonstrate the claim.
Similarly, anyone who claims that wikipedia is *far below* the quality of traditional encyclopedias has the burden of proof on *them* to demonstrate the claim.
I would propose the following metric to determine the quality of "Wikipedia" vs traditional encyclopedias: First, create a list of "encyclopedic" topics, which are topics that the vast majority of "traditional" encyclopedias include articles on. Then, rate each encyclopedia (both traditional ones and Wikipedia) for each topic area based on completeness and accuracy.
The reason I propose this particular metric is due to the fact that most criticism of Wikipedia seems to be directed at so-called "stub" articles or obscure little bits of info that no real world encyclopedia would even mention, unfairly biasing things against wikipedia due to its wider scope. From what I've seen, wikipedia seems to cover the core "encyclopedic" range of topics quite well.
So wiki considers stubs, talks and redirects as articles. Which rather makes my point.
You're pulling some sort of odd bait and switch here. Your point was that most of the material on wiki is stub-quality, and therefore that makes it less useful than a traditional encyclopedia. My response was that the vast majority of those stub and talk pages are things that'd never be in an encyclopedia to begin with. Your respose to that is that wikipedia includes stubs and talk pages in its article count? Forget bait-and-switch, this is just non-sequitur.
In addition, there seems to be an average of between 10 and 30 edits to the legitimate articles. Is that even enough to get the broad facts right?
I don't know, you tell me. It seems like the majority of pages *do* get the broad facts right.
My point is that thousands of people make vague, unsubstantiated statements on wikipedia every day. That's not the same as hard facts, and its not valuable. I'm not saying that no article on wiki is a good as a traditional encyclopaedia, just that the vast majority currently are not, which is rather the point.
You're saying all this without substantiating any of it, which is not very valuable.
Now translate that to Wikipedia and select something that you want to influence. "Windows LongDredgeUphillWarrior 2043 is the best due to it's powerful features - etc". How much would it cost you to hire 10 people to 'maintain' this information for a year?
Here's what would probably happen in wikipedia:
1) These people would post this article.
2) Most people using wikipedia would recognize it as violating NPOV (neutral point of view)
3) The people editing would change the article to be more NPOV.
4) The hired "maintainers" would change it back.
5) Other people on wikipedia would change it back again.
6) An "edit war" would ensue, with the page rapidly being edited back and forth.
7) Someone would bring the edit war to the attention of a moderator.
8) The moderator would lock the page -- and put a disclaimer at the top noting that it was locked -- until the cause for the edit war was hashed out between the participating parties
9) It would eventually be determined that one or more of the "Maintatiners" were putting in the NPOV material on purpose.
10) These "maintainers" would be banned (by ip address), and the article would be deleted or unlocked (depending on its usefulness as an article)
11) Repeat until all the "maintainers" are banned.
The system works because there are more "good guys" than "bad guys", effectively.
what that system has currently produced is a large number of articles which are so short as to be scarcely worth the name, a large number of articles which include partially/wholly untrue sections and a small number of really great articles.
Two things:
1) A lot of the articles that are "so short as to be scarecely worth the name" are on topics that would never have been covered by a traditional encyclopedia. Such "stub" articles probably shouldn't be counted in an evaluation of Wikipedia's merit unless they are of a topic that definitely should be included in any encyclopedia.
2) It's true that a lot of articles have partially or wholly untrue sections -- but this is very true of traditional encyclopedias as well. If you're going to argue that wikipedia is not as good as a traditional encyclopedia, then you should hold it to the same standard as a traditional encyclopedia when making that judgement -- not to some theoretically perfect all-correct-information standard.
Until the wikipedia consists largely of verified information, its value remains greatly diminished.
Define "verified information." Thousands of people edit and verify the information on wikipedia every day. Compare, again, to a handful of writers and editors in a traditional encyclopedia. Why do people necessarily trust the later more?
Another problem is I cannot cite Wikipedia in my reports or papers. I can certainly cite Britannica. And most schools have subscriptions to EB anyway.
You can certainly cite wikipedia.... The key is to include the exact date and time you are viewing the article you are citing, as articles can change constantly. This works, because wikipedia keeps a history of all changes to the artilcle, so someone reading your paper could easily go back and look at the exact page you cited from.
In fact, this makes citing from wikipedia more reliable than citing from most web pages, as most web pages can also change consistantly but don't keep histories of the changes (and the Wayback Machine's coverage is sometimes spotty).
Anyway, when I went to school, citing from any encyclopedia was looked down on, as encyclopedias were meant to be introductions to a topic, and we were to do our research from more primary sources.
Oh, and please don't drag the tired list of errors in Britannica, and trot out the "we fixed those errors in Wikipedia!" party line. No comparable list of errors exists for Wikipedia
I tend to think that the burden of proof is on the wikipedia condemners to show that it's decidedly *worse* than proprietary solutions.
because nobody's even *trying* to get any sort of metrics on how good or bad the content is.
1) Do those metrics exist for traditional encyclopedias?
2) Why don't *you* try to make those metrics, if they're such a concern to you?
Wikipedia's "stub" articles aside, traditional encyclopedias seem just as -- if not more -- likely to have errors / omissions as Wikipedia does. People always complain about its format and how "limiting" it is -- but no one has actually demonstrated that it's more limiting than a traditional encyclopedia.
It's like it's taken as an unquestionable assumption. Well I for one question it.
I've personally enjoyed owning tube amps on and off - the sound warmth, whether it be psychological or real, is definitely different then solid state amps.
Oh, it's definitely real. It's called "distortion."