Am I the only person who thinks Spaceship One will be the world's most expensive rollercoaster ride and won't be a viable business beyond the first accident?
On the other hand, plenty of other good and credible oceanographic circulation researchers I know would refute this, and have done extensive work on the amount of heat transported by the Gulf Stream, and its role in sustaining thermohaline circulation and associated climate effects. A press release about paper maketh noth scientific truth.
Really? Someone should tell the climate modellers.
It's not exactly a refutation is it? All you've said is that some people (mysteriously silent) would disagree. An argument from silence, in other words, a fallacy.
Not only that, but even if the Gulf Stream is not the primary deliverer of heat to northern Europe, the 20-line press release you cited does not claim that Europe's climate will not be affected by a change in thermohaline circulation.
Of course it doesn't but that isn't the point. Since the climate is a chaotic system, everything from the flap of a butterfy's wing upwards could be significant in changing that climate.
In other words: a straw man.
The gulf stream is produced by the difference in temperature between tropics and the Arctic, and by the rotation of the Earth. Unless you're proposing that either will disappear soon, I'd suggest you'd better clue up on some rather basic science.
So if you're searching for a thin vine to cling to the increasingly untenable view that carbon-loading of the atmosphere is not a major problem, better not grab too hard on this one.
Always assuming that the rise in carbon dioxide has anything to do with the weak rise in temperatures over the past 100 years. In other words: post hoc ergo propter hoc is yet another fallacy
The thin vine is "carbon loading". Since at least 95% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is of natural origin, that loading could be seen as very much less significant than climate alarmists will admit. Until it starts to cool again, and then we'll wheel out the dreadful consequences of soot.
Did Einstein publish his stuff and allow anyone to freely change it?
You say
Hmmm, having worked for Science magazine at one time I can see some of your points, but you are missing the fact that science relies on collaboration and cooperation between scientists. Look at any research paper and you will see numerous authors listed.
I bet you that all of them will have relevant qualifications and experience. Hardly anarchy in action is it?
The free software movement is another example of anarchism in action.
No it isn't. We've already covered this one. No software project of whatever size could plausibly use a programming model where anyone regardless of ability, expertise or experience could make any number of changes to software code at any time and expect it to work.
"Free software" is another model for market economics by barter and by making money from support services. Anarchy in action? Nope. Same with Indymedia.
History does tell us that careless information, like careless talk, costs lives.
What a fucking drama queen. And you still haven't answered the question: what do you propose to do about it, other than whining here on Slashdot?
Yep, That must be it. There's absolutely no reason why anyone should bother with Nazi propagandists like David Irving, because after all, everyone's entitled to an opinion. And the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", not much happened as a result of that piece of pseudohistory, did it? Or the intelligence information fed to the American and British people about the dread threat of WMDs held by Saddam Hussein that he could launch at any moment? Nobody was hurt by that one..
What am I doing here on Slashdot? Expressing my freedom of speech.
You appear to have a real difficulty with the concept. I hear China's lovely this time of year.
Except that on the internet there is no way for you or anyone else to replace Wikipedia (or anything else) with your scholarly sources without the imposition of standards by force. The only thing you can do is offer your work *in addition to* the stuff that's already there. You don't get any other options.
That's one of beauties of the internet; you have to live with the things you don't like *because you don't get a vote in the matter*.
Where have I said that I want Wikipedia closed down? Where? I haven't said anything about Wikipedia being forced to close, because I don't like it.
Now you're just a lying troll. You just accuse me of what you're doing.
You've already said won't accept authoritative information that is critical to the functioning of some machinery that you rely on.
I've said no such thing, although apparently stooping to the level of a lying sack of shit isn't beyond you - and rather ironic, since you've made such a fuss over the presentation of inaccurate information. Pot, here's kettle.
Let me quote what you actually said:
Anyone who actually builds planes for a living isn't going to use Wikipedia as a reference source when laying out building plans. This should be obvious to anyone with half a brain, and those who don't have even that won't be building planes for anyone but themselves any time in the future.
So you did make the claim that you want to authoritative information written by experts on things that matter to you. Elitist? Maybe you should go to a country where they accept anybody's opinion on how to build planes - now that's REAL freedom of speech.
Or is it just bullshit from a troll? So people are pouring shit from the rooftops, but its alright because I'm not stupid enough to look up and I'm wearing waders. So Wikipedia is inaccurate, its not as if anybody would be stupid enough to believe it. Would they?
You're clearly looking at a different internet from the rest of us.
Back under the bridge, troll. Show's over.
And yet again you sidestep the question of what you'd do about this 'problem'. Because the only alternative is to have some dictatorial government body step into every crevasse of the internet and prosecute anyone and everyone who doesn't have the proper clearance for 'approved speech'. If there is another solution you haven't seen fit to share it here.
Oh that's good. I haven't specified an 'answer' therefore I have no right to identify a 'problem'? Which planet are you on?
I said nothing about "approved speech" or the imposition of a dictatorial government overseeing the Internet and Wikipedia.
Isn't it amazing that the alternative to "Wikipedia" must be control by a totalitarian government? I've never suggested it.
There's a wide difference between scholarship and government-imposed information filtered to the masses.
You've already said won't accept authoritative information that is critical to the functioning of some machinery that you rely on. Why not? Isn't that attitude elitist? Don't you realise that by narrowing the scope of changes to experts, you're accepting control by a few experts?
(note: this is sarcasm)
Thanks, but I'll take "free speech" for $200, Alex. Even if most of the speech is bullshit, it's still miles ahead of non-free speech.
What use is freedom of speech if what you've been taught are lies?
Don't answer that. I'm sure that you can dance around why you accept scholarship and expertise when you want it, yet think that Wikipedia is some sort of MMORPG with history, and it doesn't matter.
Why the fuck should I do that? Anyone who actually builds planes for a living isn't going to use Wikipedia as a reference source when laying out building plans. This should be obvious to anyone with half a brain, and those who don't have even that won't be building planes for anyone but themselves any time in the future.
OK. Try teaching high school kids facts about the world from Wikipedia. Does scholarship and accuracy matter then? Because without a doubt, schoolkids do use Wikipedia to learn facts. All over the world.
Comfortable with that?
Why should the schoolkids across the world be fed information which may be false? Because they might attain adulthood and make choices based upon it?
Or perhaps when you're able to distinguish between the reality of wikipedia and the fantasy of some Orwellian end to factual information world-wide.
You're right, I can't. Because there is no difference.
Wikipedia is just the internet writ small. If you believe that it's dangerous then by your own definition you must also believe that the entire internet is dangerous. And if that's the case, what precisely do you propose to do? Give up the whole mess to some elite body to run?
The entire Internet IS dangerous. Rumours and lies can circle the globe in less than a second.
The problem is that Wikipedia is just the Internet writ small. It's no more self-correcting than the websites, blogs, newsgroups and message boards of the Internet are assymtotically reaching the goal of pure informational consciousness by endless attrition.
If its not reliable then what is it? History does tell us that careless information, like careless talk, costs lives. If history is inaccurate then people can be very easily manipulated to do the wrong thing and make disastrous choices. The Iraq War, would be a recent example.
The only thing I got from both of your long-winded posts was that you seem to think that either a) Wikipedia and anything like it should be shut down, or b) Wikipedia and anything like it should be run by some discrete group of elite intellects who happen to stand in agreement with you on whatever topic pushes your hot buttons.
You're right I should dumb it down rather than be so elitist.
Here goes: WIKIPEDIA SUX! BRITANNICA ROOLZ!!!!
I agree that Wikipedia should never be used as a source of actual facts; however, it's quite valuable in pointing the way to finding said facts. And anyone who takes wikipedia as a trusted source is just another bump on the road in internet darwinism anyway, so why does it matter? It's not like these people are going to educate themselves in the real world, so the fact that they take Wikipedia as The One True Font of Knowledge(TM) is hardly a loss, or even surprising.
Now apply that principle to aerospace engineering. Would you ever fly in a plane that was built using manuals where anybody could change anything at any time?
Of course anybody who flew in such a plane is probably a Darwin Award winner anyway, so what does it matter? It sucks if it came down on a populated area, but you can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs. Am I right?
In other words, why are you getting your panties in such a bunch over this?
I have been watching somebody deliberately planting false information about real people and fake references into Wikipedia. I know its false. That person knows its false. But nobody notices because nobody is responsible. He can't be the only historical revisionist at his SpeakWrite at the Ministry of Truth.
I think that it won't change significantly until Wikipedia discovers that Comrade Ogilvy has started a conflict. People have been killed in panics or conflicts caused by false information. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a warning from history, but everybody thinks that "it won't happen now because we're more sophisticated".
your beef sounds like the famous quote where Bill Gates asked "who would write software for free?" golly gee, free software could never be as good as software you pay for.
Software, even free software is built by experts. It's modular and its built to an exact specification of function. If software were built like Wikipedia, then anyone could change a line here or there, or add bits in because they feel like it, or delete sections because "it's too prolix"? With no software control, no overall design, no security, no nothing?
Is that what you're suggesting?
No software is built in the style of Wikipedia. Ever. I defy anyone to produce any software that does anything useful using the Wikipedia model.
Yet somehow Wikipedia is equated with open-source software because both are free - yes that's true but so is bullshit. See your local farmer for details.
Open source software is not a free-for-all, anyone can edit anything at any time, and everybody else's copy suddenly changes to the latest iteration - quite the reverse. Versioning, testing and design processes are tightly controlled, even if it is open source.
How many "oversights" are there? And why is it my responsibility to fix Wikipedia? What do I get out of it? What happens if some moron reverts it? Who is responsible then? Do I have to stand guard in perpetuity? Why should I do this?
That's the other thing about Wikipedia. Everyone is responsible except the WikiMedia Foundation who publishes it. You find a problem? You're responsible for fixing that problem. The response to Siegenthaler was the same at first: "it's your biography - you fix it".
Jimbo Wales have created a large "Somebody Else's Problem" Field around Wikipedia. Nobody is to blame for the mistakes. Nobody takes responsibility.
Wikipedia will take the credit for somebody else's scholarship, but when the crap flies, its somebody else's problem.
Where's Comrade Ogilvy? He's definitely in there...
Wrong. I checked with Richard Evans on this very point. Here is his reply:
The claim about 'hundreds of thousands of refugees' is taken from Irving, and has no basis in evidence. The population of Dresden in early 1945 was much smaller than 600,000, because of men being away at the front, families evacuated to the country, and so on. It may have grown because of refugees but it was unlikely to have exceeded 600,000 even with this factored in.
I know of nobody who has claimed that the Ministry of Propaganda estimated between 350,000 and 400,000 deaths The second paragraph is much more accurate. What the Ministry did was to take those figures and add a '0' to each of them. Communist authorities did not produce official estimates of 140,000 to my knowledge - they put the figure at around 35,000.
The only source for those figures quoted in the Dresden article was Irving's book, but since there was no citation in the text of the article to suggest where those figures came from, who would know except an expert?
Wikipedia does not work. In order not to be fooled by Wikipedia's scholarship (or lack of it) requires that you know the subject already. Otherwise you, me, Jimbo Wales' little boy in Africa and everyone else are being fed lies.
Who knows if there aren't more "Comrade Ogilvy" articles in Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is modeled on anarchist ideas, which do work...
I've yet to see an anarchist project actually work. Or an anarchist come to think of it.
Collaborative scholarship does work, in fact I believe that science is based on the idea of collaborative scholarship.
Erm, no it's not. Science definitely isn't based on collaborative scholarship. Science is based on expertise, experimental verification and continual testing both theoretical and empirical. Scientific progress is made by tearing down old paradigms with new ones.
It's definitely not the case that 6 billion ignoramuses = 1 Albert Einstein.
I think you've imbibed on the Wikipedia weed rather heavily.
That's fascinating, but the problem is "How do you know that the facts that you're given in the many different areas of knowledge that you don't know about, are true, only partially true, or false"?
How do you know that the information you have on Nepal is accurate and even more scarily, complete? How do you know that 5 minutes before you searched, somebody didn't add some false or deliberately misleading information?
You have no guarantees, and since Wikipedia is widely scraped for information by other information services, you're going to be hard pressed to find out whether the information you've got is correct or not.
I know for a fact that doctors have edited medical citations in Wikipedia that are completely wrong, only to have the reverted back to the wrong information.
Before we get to the "People tend to judge Wikipedia by its worst articles" schtick, lets consider what Jimbo Wales actually says about Wikipedia.
Quote from his personal plea for donations
Wikipedia is based on a very radical idea, the realization of the dreams most of us have always had for what the Internet can and should become. Thousands of people, all over the world, from all cultures, working together in harmony to freely share clear, factual, unbiased information... a simple and pure desire to make the world a better place.
This is a radical strike at the heart of an increasingly shallow, proprietary and anti-intellectual culture. It is a radical strike at the assumption that the Internet has to be a place of hostile debate and flame wars. It is an appeal to the best within all of us.
Unfortunately for Jimbo, reality strikes Wikipedia every bit as much as the rest of the Internet. The best part is that Wikipedia is itself "at the heart of an increasingly shallow, proprietary and anti-intellectual culture". Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, left the project precisely because Wikipedia is also "a place of hostile debate and flame wars"
More importantly, Winston Smiths are at their SpeakWrite terminals in all parts of the building known as the Internet, and rewriting history moment by moment according to no scholarship, qualification, or skill of any kind, and with all sorts of favorite beliefs, attitudes, political viewpoints and different worldviews, and with no oversight, or background checking.
What chance does any of us have to check whether something is true or not? Wikipedia is not in the slightest bit scholarly.
Consider two articles: the biography of David Irving and the article on Dresden
In the biography, Irving is quite accurately characterised as a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history in regard to the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. In the libel trial in 2000 which Irving brought, an expert historian went through all of his books including his first book on the "Bombing of Dresden" and found that it was full of mistakes and misleading statistics which inflated the number of people in Dresden at the time of the bombing.
Yet, the article on Dresden in Wikipedia cites "The Bombing of Dresden" by David Irving as a key reference in regard to the historical event near the end of WW2
Some mistake?
How would you know to check the misleading and false citation on that historical event, especially if you didn't recognise that the source of that information came from a virulent racist, anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who blatently and repeatedly falsified history in his books to the benefit of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis?
Jimbo Wales again:
I'm doing this for the child in Africa who is going to use free textbooks and reference works produced by our community and find a solution to the crushing poverty that surrounds him.
And if you don't know that about the Dresden article, how is this poor child in Africa supposed to know?
I'm not in the slightest bit surprised by Wikipedia's funding crisis-in-the-making. I think what has happened is the John Siegenthaler affair has caused serious examination of exactly what is Wikipedia, and what is the quality of their scholarship?
A: What's scholarship? What's quality?
It's time to face some facts. Wikipedia should be no more authoritative as an encyclopedia as Slashdot comments are about technology and current affairs. The basis on which Wikipedia is founded is indistinguishable from the political viewpoint of Anarchism, the idea that without leadership and expertise, a collection of people can be collectively wiser than any individual.
Actually what you get is a disorganized mess, where the relatively few articles are genuinely good, then there's a large number of articles which may have started well, but have been mediocritized and dismembered after the original author decided to give up trying to revert stuff, and there's a considerable number of factual articles on subjects you've never heard of which are little more than a couple of lines followed by the Wikipedia disclaimer:
"This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it."
What really happens is the article is never expanded, because of the human need to improve something only if that person has a stake in its improvement, and that improvement is recognised. Face it, would you rather take over somebody's half finished, buggy computer program which has no documentation or would you rather start again and do it properly?
If you flick through Wikipedia using the "Random Article" link, what you find is the mixture of articles that I have mentioned: the great few, the large mediocre and poorly constructed, and the tremendous number of unhelpful half-and-quarter articles which give no information and no citation.
Even if you do create a great article, there's no stopping any number of morons from turning your well-thought out and considered article with full references into a mishmash of non-sequiturs and out-and-out false statements. Nobody's on your side because as long as the dreaded "NPOV" is observed, no-one could care less about the effort you put in.
Eventually you give up and accept the entropic effect of thousands of ignoramuses. You relax and realise that you tried your best but no-one gives a shit. A frog is dissected. Pinkerton does not return.
The problem comes when you want some vital information. Wikipedia is highly rated by Google (which if you think about it, is another anarchistic idea promoted to Internet paradigm) so you go to Wikipedia and you read the article.
Now the question: Is what I'm reading in the article factually and historically correct? How can I check? Erm. Is the person I must speak to, a scholar, a college geek, an idiot with too much time on his hands, an IP address?
Ah, but Wikipedia has an answer to this conundrum! If you believe anything that Wikipedia says then "Fool You!". It's your responsibility to check whether all, most or any of the facts are correct. "We cannot help you, we are just facilitators in this great experiment in democratized scholarship"
I'll believe in democratized scholarship when I believe in democratized rocket science or democratized car mechanics or democratized aircraft piloting.
It's a nonsense and anyone with an ounce of sense, knows that its a nonsense. And it's a very dangerous nonsense, because in an interconnected world, false information and twisted history leads to conflict. Real conflict, because conflicts and wars are waged because of history.
You want to know what I find scary about Wikipedia? Read this chapter and tell me whether or not someone could have written Comrade Ogilvy into Wikipedia.
I'll tell you for free, I already know that there are articles on Wikipedia which are largely or completely fictional. Your mission, should you choose to take it, is to work out which ones, because Winston Smith lives and he's speaking into the SpeakWrite and changing history before our very eyes.
What are you babbling about? Who says there is no warming? Not me.
I simply point out that according to actual temperature stations in the Arctic, the current temperatures are not exceptional and appear to have been higher in the 1930s than they are today. Since climate alarmists persist in saying that its warming...and therefore...they never point out that they always measure that warming against a known cold period (the 1950s and 1960s).
Most characteristic of the constant crying of "wolf" is the need to extrapolate from a single data point. Four polar bears appeared to have drowned, that's a shame (unless you're a seal, that is). So is this unusual? A growing trend? Nobody knows.
I pointed out that the posterchild for linking carbon dioxide to temperatures (the so-called "Mann Hockey Stick") has been shown to have been a product of bad statistics (and pointed to the peer-reviewed article that demonstrates it). I point out that there is a study of all the multiproxy reconstructions showing that they ALL have severe mathematical conclusions that invalidate their results.
Your link doesn't address it at all, it only deals with the last 30 years. Do you think all/.ers are that stupid?
Yes, sea ice is diminishing. Yes, climate change is happening. But that's always been the case. The sea ice retreated in the 1920s and 1930s further back than today. A thousand years ago Erik the Red found Greenland so warm and green that they could grow crops there. It's still too cold to do that today.
Somehow the bizarro world of climate alarmism links four dead polar bears to global catastrophe. Tune in to Reality FM.
Four dead polar bears in the open ocean. Therefore they died because they drowned. Therefore its because the Arctic has warmed recently. Therefore the warming is caused by "Global Warming" caused by human fossil fuel use.
But wait, the Arctic from 70-90 is still not as warm as the 1930s, as can be seen from long station records all across the high Arctic (for example Nuuk or Ostrov Dikson ) This was well before large increases in carbon dioxide.
Since the poster child for linking climate change with carbon dioxide use has been shown to be a product of bad statistics and the whole multiproxy study paradigm shown to be without significance (see Bürger, G., and U. Cubasch (2005), Are multiproxy climate reconstructions robust?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L23711, doi:10.1029/2005GL024155.) I'd say the whole "Cry Polar Bears are drowning" schtick to be Yet Another Fake Panic.
Therefore, hence, or in conclusion: I call bullshit.
Of course this message has been brought to you by Exxon Mobil, the Bush Administration, the Republican Party, the Freemasons, the Illuminati and all stations to Satan.
1. No more science to be done on the ISS. Who noticed? When compared to the Hubble, where is the outcry from the scientific community? 2. If there's no science to be done on the ISS, why is it manned? 3. If it shouldn't be manned and there's no science to be done, why is it there?
It's a matter of time before there's a Survivor: International Space Station, where the losers get flung out of the hatch and make their own way back by hitching a ride on the next Soyuz.
Does anyone still need convincing that Novell's upper management has no clue? SuSE was known as a great KDE distro, so that's why we're going to standardize on Gnome.
Brilliant.
Memo to turnaround specialists and consortium builders:
Buy Novell sooner rather than later. Then you get get rid of the useless Soviet-style bureaucracy and reverse the idiot decisions before all of the investment that Novell has made goes right down the plughole.
Novell is full of people either without a clue or been made to regret ever challenging their leaders over anything. The only thing a neck is for in Novell is not for sticking it out, but for ducking when the brown squidgy stuff hits the electrical whirly thing.
True story: I know someone who worked who had a great idea. He patented it. He presented it to Novell because he knew that if Novell used the patent, it could break into the next wave of the Internet well before any of its competitors. He was told to talk to the VP in charge of investments. The VP told him that the only way to get Novell to even consider the patent and the accompanying business plan for investment was to leave the company and then present it from outside because Novell did not invest in the ideas of its employees. At all. Ever.
We more than appreciate bringing this really horrible violation to our attention. As you can imagine we are shocked and are trying to get our service provider at home to come in and correct it.
I replied that hopefully when the site is restored (and properly secured), he can let Slashdot know.
Slashdot Mirror
Wordpress 2.0, Spam Karma, Bad Behavior, PhpBB all completely rock.
Am I the only person who thinks Spaceship One will be the world's most expensive rollercoaster ride and won't be a viable business beyond the first accident?
Really? Someone should tell the climate modellers.
It's not exactly a refutation is it? All you've said is that some people (mysteriously silent) would disagree. An argument from silence, in other words, a fallacy.
Of course it doesn't but that isn't the point. Since the climate is a chaotic system, everything from the flap of a butterfy's wing upwards could be significant in changing that climate.
In other words: a straw man.
The gulf stream is produced by the difference in temperature between tropics and the Arctic, and by the rotation of the Earth. Unless you're proposing that either will disappear soon, I'd suggest you'd better clue up on some rather basic science.
Always assuming that the rise in carbon dioxide has anything to do with the weak rise in temperatures over the past 100 years. In other words: post hoc ergo propter hoc is yet another fallacy
The thin vine is "carbon loading". Since at least 95% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is of natural origin, that loading could be seen as very much less significant than climate alarmists will admit. Until it starts to cool again, and then we'll wheel out the dreadful consequences of soot.
Except that the Gulf Stream is too weak to carry much heat to Europe. It's yet another myth that most people are unaware is a myth.
Want to know why Europe is warmer than Eastern North America even though they're at the same latitude?
It's right here
It's caused by a combination of the Rocky Mountains and the fact that oceans store heat in summer and release it in winter.
Another climate scare debunked! You read it here on
Very funny.
You say
I bet you that all of them will have relevant qualifications and experience. Hardly anarchy in action is it?
No it isn't. We've already covered this one. No software project of whatever size could plausibly use a programming model where anyone regardless of ability, expertise or experience could make any number of changes to software code at any time and expect it to work.
"Free software" is another model for market economics by barter and by making money from support services. Anarchy in action? Nope. Same with Indymedia.
Yep, That must be it. There's absolutely no reason why anyone should bother with Nazi propagandists like David Irving, because after all, everyone's entitled to an opinion. And the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", not much happened as a result of that piece of pseudohistory, did it? Or the intelligence information fed to the American and British people about the dread threat of WMDs held by Saddam Hussein that he could launch at any moment? Nobody was hurt by that one..
What am I doing here on Slashdot? Expressing my freedom of speech.
You appear to have a real difficulty with the concept. I hear China's lovely this time of year.
Oh that's good. I haven't specified an 'answer' therefore I have no right to identify a 'problem'? Which planet are you on?
I said nothing about "approved speech" or the imposition of a dictatorial government overseeing the Internet and Wikipedia.
Isn't it amazing that the alternative to "Wikipedia" must be control by a totalitarian government? I've never suggested it.
There's a wide difference between scholarship and government-imposed information filtered to the masses.
You've already said won't accept authoritative information that is critical to the functioning of some machinery that you rely on. Why not? Isn't that attitude elitist? Don't you realise that by narrowing the scope of changes to experts, you're accepting control by a few experts?
(note: this is sarcasm)
What use is freedom of speech if what you've been taught are lies?
Don't answer that. I'm sure that you can dance around why you accept scholarship and expertise when you want it, yet think that Wikipedia is some sort of MMORPG with history, and it doesn't matter.
OK. Try teaching high school kids facts about the world from Wikipedia. Does scholarship and accuracy matter then? Because without a doubt, schoolkids do use Wikipedia to learn facts. All over the world.
Comfortable with that?
Why should the schoolkids across the world be fed information which may be false? Because they might attain adulthood and make choices based upon it?
You're right, I can't. Because there is no difference.
The entire Internet IS dangerous. Rumours and lies can circle the globe in less than a second.
The problem is that Wikipedia is just the Internet writ small. It's no more self-correcting than the websites, blogs, newsgroups and message boards of the Internet are assymtotically reaching the goal of pure informational consciousness by endless attrition.
If its not reliable then what is it? History does tell us that careless information, like careless talk, costs lives. If history is inaccurate then people can be very easily manipulated to do the wrong thing and make disastrous choices. The Iraq War, would be a recent example.
You're right I should dumb it down rather than be so elitist.
Here goes: WIKIPEDIA SUX! BRITANNICA ROOLZ!!!!
Now apply that principle to aerospace engineering. Would you ever fly in a plane that was built using manuals where anybody could change anything at any time?
Of course anybody who flew in such a plane is probably a Darwin Award winner anyway, so what does it matter? It sucks if it came down on a populated area, but you can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs. Am I right?
This
If you don't understand after reading that, then there's no hope.
Exactly.
I have been watching somebody deliberately planting false information about real people and fake references into Wikipedia. I know its false. That person knows its false. But nobody notices because nobody is responsible. He can't be the only historical revisionist at his SpeakWrite at the Ministry of Truth.
I think that it won't change significantly until Wikipedia discovers that Comrade Ogilvy has started a conflict. People have been killed in panics or conflicts caused by false information. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a warning from history, but everybody thinks that "it won't happen now because we're more sophisticated".
How many "oversights" are there? And why is it my responsibility to fix Wikipedia? What do I get out of it? What happens if some moron reverts it? Who is responsible then? Do I have to stand guard in perpetuity? Why should I do this?
That's the other thing about Wikipedia. Everyone is responsible except the WikiMedia Foundation who publishes it. You find a problem? You're responsible for fixing that problem. The response to Siegenthaler was the same at first: "it's your biography - you fix it".
Jimbo Wales have created a large "Somebody Else's Problem" Field around Wikipedia. Nobody is to blame for the mistakes. Nobody takes responsibility.
Wikipedia will take the credit for somebody else's scholarship, but when the crap flies, its somebody else's problem.
Where's Comrade Ogilvy? He's definitely in there...
I've yet to see an anarchist project actually work. Or an anarchist come to think of it.
Erm, no it's not. Science definitely isn't based on collaborative scholarship. Science is based on expertise, experimental verification and continual testing both theoretical and empirical. Scientific progress is made by tearing down old paradigms with new ones.
It's definitely not the case that 6 billion ignoramuses = 1 Albert Einstein.
I think you've imbibed on the Wikipedia weed rather heavily.
How do you know that the information you have on Nepal is accurate and even more scarily, complete? How do you know that 5 minutes before you searched, somebody didn't add some false or deliberately misleading information?
You have no guarantees, and since Wikipedia is widely scraped for information by other information services, you're going to be hard pressed to find out whether the information you've got is correct or not.
I know for a fact that doctors have edited medical citations in Wikipedia that are completely wrong, only to have the reverted back to the wrong information.
Before we get to the "People tend to judge Wikipedia by its worst articles" schtick, lets consider what Jimbo Wales actually says about Wikipedia.
Quote from his personal plea for donations
Unfortunately for Jimbo, reality strikes Wikipedia every bit as much as the rest of the Internet. The best part is that Wikipedia is itself "at the heart of an increasingly shallow, proprietary and anti-intellectual culture". Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, left the project precisely because Wikipedia is also "a place of hostile debate and flame wars"
More importantly, Winston Smiths are at their SpeakWrite terminals in all parts of the building known as the Internet, and rewriting history moment by moment according to no scholarship, qualification, or skill of any kind, and with all sorts of favorite beliefs, attitudes, political viewpoints and different worldviews, and with no oversight, or background checking.
What chance does any of us have to check whether something is true or not? Wikipedia is not in the slightest bit scholarly.
Consider two articles: the biography of David Irving and the article on Dresden
In the biography, Irving is quite accurately characterised as a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history in regard to the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. In the libel trial in 2000 which Irving brought, an expert historian went through all of his books including his first book on the "Bombing of Dresden" and found that it was full of mistakes and misleading statistics which inflated the number of people in Dresden at the time of the bombing.
Yet, the article on Dresden in Wikipedia cites "The Bombing of Dresden" by David Irving as a key reference in regard to the historical event near the end of WW2
Some mistake?
How would you know to check the misleading and false citation on that historical event, especially if you didn't recognise that the source of that information came from a virulent racist, anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who blatently and repeatedly falsified history in his books to the benefit of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis?
Jimbo Wales again:
And if you don't know that about the Dresden article, how is this poor child in Africa supposed to know?
Wikipedia is an Orwellian nightmare.
I'm not in the slightest bit surprised by Wikipedia's funding crisis-in-the-making. I think what has happened is the John Siegenthaler affair has caused serious examination of exactly what is Wikipedia, and what is the quality of their scholarship?
A: What's scholarship? What's quality?
It's time to face some facts. Wikipedia should be no more authoritative as an encyclopedia as Slashdot comments are about technology and current affairs. The basis on which Wikipedia is founded is indistinguishable from the political viewpoint of Anarchism, the idea that without leadership and expertise, a collection of people can be collectively wiser than any individual.
Actually what you get is a disorganized mess, where the relatively few articles are genuinely good, then there's a large number of articles which may have started well, but have been mediocritized and dismembered after the original author decided to give up trying to revert stuff, and there's a considerable number of factual articles on subjects you've never heard of which are little more than a couple of lines followed by the Wikipedia disclaimer:
"This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it."
What really happens is the article is never expanded, because of the human need to improve something only if that person has a stake in its improvement, and that improvement is recognised. Face it, would you rather take over somebody's half finished, buggy computer program which has no documentation or would you rather start again and do it properly?
If you flick through Wikipedia using the "Random Article" link, what you find is the mixture of articles that I have mentioned: the great few, the large mediocre and poorly constructed, and the tremendous number of unhelpful half-and-quarter articles which give no information and no citation.
Even if you do create a great article, there's no stopping any number of morons from turning your well-thought out and considered article with full references into a mishmash of non-sequiturs and out-and-out false statements. Nobody's on your side because as long as the dreaded "NPOV" is observed, no-one could care less about the effort you put in.
Eventually you give up and accept the entropic effect of thousands of ignoramuses. You relax and realise that you tried your best but no-one gives a shit. A frog is dissected. Pinkerton does not return.
The problem comes when you want some vital information. Wikipedia is highly rated by Google (which if you think about it, is another anarchistic idea promoted to Internet paradigm) so you go to Wikipedia and you read the article.
Now the question: Is what I'm reading in the article factually and historically correct? How can I check? Erm. Is the person I must speak to, a scholar, a college geek, an idiot with too much time on his hands, an IP address?
Ah, but Wikipedia has an answer to this conundrum! If you believe anything that Wikipedia says then "Fool You!". It's your responsibility to check whether all, most or any of the facts are correct. "We cannot help you, we are just facilitators in this great experiment in democratized scholarship"
I'll believe in democratized scholarship when I believe in democratized rocket science or democratized car mechanics or democratized aircraft piloting.
It's a nonsense and anyone with an ounce of sense, knows that its a nonsense. And it's a very dangerous nonsense, because in an interconnected world, false information and twisted history leads to conflict. Real conflict, because conflicts and wars are waged because of history.
You want to know what I find scary about Wikipedia? Read this chapter and tell me whether or not someone could have written Comrade Ogilvy into Wikipedia.
I'll tell you for free, I already know that there are articles on Wikipedia which are largely or completely fictional. Your mission, should you choose to take it, is to work out which ones, because Winston Smith lives and he's speaking into the SpeakWrite and changing history before our very eyes.
What are you babbling about? Who says there is no warming? Not me.
/.ers are that stupid?
I simply point out that according to actual temperature stations in the Arctic, the current temperatures are not exceptional and appear to have been higher in the 1930s than they are today. Since climate alarmists persist in saying that its warming...and therefore...they never point out that they always measure that warming against a known cold period (the 1950s and 1960s).
Most characteristic of the constant crying of "wolf" is the need to extrapolate from a single data point. Four polar bears appeared to have drowned, that's a shame (unless you're a seal, that is). So is this unusual? A growing trend? Nobody knows.
I pointed out that the posterchild for linking carbon dioxide to temperatures (the so-called "Mann Hockey Stick") has been shown to have been a product of bad statistics (and pointed to the peer-reviewed article that demonstrates it). I point out that there is a study of all the multiproxy reconstructions showing that they ALL have severe mathematical conclusions that invalidate their results.
Your link doesn't address it at all, it only deals with the last 30 years. Do you think all
Yes, sea ice is diminishing. Yes, climate change is happening. But that's always been the case. The sea ice retreated in the 1920s and 1930s further back than today. A thousand years ago Erik the Red found Greenland so warm and green that they could grow crops there. It's still too cold to do that today.
Somehow the bizarro world of climate alarmism links four dead polar bears to global catastrophe. Tune in to Reality FM.
Four dead polar bears in the open ocean. Therefore they died because they drowned. Therefore its because the Arctic has warmed recently. Therefore the warming is caused by "Global Warming" caused by human fossil fuel use.
But wait, the Arctic from 70-90 is still not as warm as the 1930s, as can be seen from long station records all across the high Arctic (for example Nuuk or Ostrov Dikson ) This was well before large increases in carbon dioxide.
Since the poster child for linking climate change with carbon dioxide use has been shown to be a product of bad statistics and the whole multiproxy study paradigm shown to be without significance (see Bürger, G., and U. Cubasch (2005), Are multiproxy climate reconstructions robust?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L23711, doi:10.1029/2005GL024155.) I'd say the whole "Cry Polar Bears are drowning" schtick to be Yet Another Fake Panic.
Therefore, hence, or in conclusion: I call bullshit.
Of course this message has been brought to you by Exxon Mobil, the Bush Administration, the Republican Party, the Freemasons, the Illuminati and all stations to Satan.
1. No more science to be done on the ISS. Who noticed? When compared to the Hubble, where is the outcry from the scientific community?
2. If there's no science to be done on the ISS, why is it manned?
3. If it shouldn't be manned and there's no science to be done, why is it there?
It's a matter of time before there's a Survivor: International Space Station, where the losers get flung out of the hatch and make their own way back by hitching a ride on the next Soyuz.
Does anyone still need convincing that Novell's upper management has no clue? SuSE was known as a great KDE distro, so that's why we're going to standardize on Gnome.
Brilliant.
Memo to turnaround specialists and consortium builders:
Buy Novell sooner rather than later. Then you get get rid of the useless Soviet-style bureaucracy and reverse the idiot decisions before all of the investment that Novell has made goes right down the plughole.
Novell is full of people either without a clue or been made to regret ever challenging their leaders over anything. The only thing a neck is for in Novell is not for sticking it out, but for ducking when the brown squidgy stuff hits the electrical whirly thing.
True story: I know someone who worked who had a great idea. He patented it. He presented it to Novell because he knew that if Novell used the patent, it could break into the next wave of the Internet well before any of its competitors. He was told to talk to the VP in charge of investments. The VP told him that the only way to get Novell to even consider the patent and the accompanying business plan for investment was to leave the company and then present it from outside because Novell did not invest in the ideas of its employees. At all. Ever.
I replied that hopefully when the site is restored (and properly secured), he can let Slashdot know.
Some slimeball has hacked the LA theater Works website and put a picture of Mr Goatse on it. Well done idiots. *slow hand clap*