I, as well as most other folks, just use Wikipedia as "read-only", to look things up. I don't really envision myself being the helpful type, as you are. So there's really no reason for us to be logged in.
There is a reason for non-editors to have a username. Logged in users can change how the layout of Wikipedia appears to them through this page. Here are previews of different layouts, for non-logged in users:
Logged in users can also change how math equations are displayed, how large images should be displayed in pages, change the date and time edits are made in article histories from UTC to your local time, and also manipulate Wikipedia's search engine for the number of hits per page and lines per hit. You can also change whether it should underline internal links to other pages and whether Wikipedia pages should display a "table of contents."
In short, you have to sign up for Wikipedia's appearance to become very customizable.
Wikipedia has a process for electing administrators from amongst the experienced Wikipedia editors in the community. They also have a process for removing them when they misbehave. A problem might be that they aren't even required to give their real name, let alone their qualifications. One might suggest that standards should be stricter and professional experience should be required in order to tighten standards, but most of the 900 administrators already elected would disagree for obvious reasons.
These administrators also tend to be the ones that say that administrators make up too much of a percentage of the community for the amount required to maintain the project, and thus restrictions on promoting future administrators should be encouraged.
I think they need to take a vote within the ranks, and let the editing community decide
Administrators are already elected by the community. Administratorship has been claimed to be like a "janitorial" job, at least if it's done right. Delete an article marked for immediate deletion. Look at an Article for Deletion debate and close it according to the consensus. Looking at the discussion page of an article to see if the community has reached a decision has been reached on updating an article should be just another "janitorial" job. Processes have recently been put in place that allow the community to vote to demote an administrator. There are approximately 900 administrators.
The next step above an administrator is a Bureaucrat. Bureaucrats have powers to promote users to administrators and bureaucrats at the community's request, to change a Wikipedia username at that user's request, and to flag accounts as being used by "bots," computer programs designed to check for common spelling errors, revert obvious vandalism, or add a link to the same Wikipedia article in a different language. Stewards are a level above bureaucrats and have the power to change the status of anyone on any Wikimedia project: Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikimedia Incubator. Bureaucrats and stewards are also elected by the community.
As the above positions are supposed to function as "janitors," Wikipedia also has an elected group of users that are the final authority in resolving disputes among Wikipedia users called the Arbitration Committee. At the beginning of Wikipedia, the committee was entirely appointed by Jimmy Wales, but since then gradually each "seat" on the Committee has been opened to be decided in an election. There is only one seat left that was appointed by Jimmy Wales, and his "term" ends in 2007. Thus, in this area, Wikipedia is becoming more open and democratic.
Charged with managing the entire Wikimedia project is the Wikimedia Board of Trustees. Two seats are elected, two seats are appointed by Jimmy Wales, and one seat is held by Jimmy Wales, chairman of the Board for life. The Board has elected a vice-chair from amongst themselves that would take over if Jimmy Wales suddenly died or was assassinated, but it isn't publicly available who that is. One Board member that had been elected by the community has resigned, and several more elected seats are now being added to the Board. Wikimedia is currently in the middle of an election for these seats.
There is a vast bureaucracy behind the Wikipedia "anarchy." Look over here and you'll see they even have little rubber stamps ("templates," they call them) that they throw on discussion pages to mark an article's quality.
The Klingon Wikipedia was started independently by a few administrators and Klingon speakers, and then it was shut down by Wikimedia by the time the people at the top noticed it existed with 62 articles. They decided fictional language versions of Wikimedia projects should not be hosted on Wikimedia servers (20 of which were courteously donated by Yahoo!, with the rest being bought through donor money).
Curiously, that hasn't stopped a user at Wikimedia Incubator, which was started last month to host test wikis for trial periods before they become official projects, from creating a Wikipedia in the fictional Qenya language from Tolkien's books. I wonder how long it'll be 'til that one's noticed.
If the moon going further away from the Earth causes the barycenter of Earth to drift outside its surface, then the Earth will be orbiting a point outside itself, with its orbit becoming greater the farther the barycenter drifts, until it peaks at one point. This is similar to Pluto constantly orbiting a point outside itself, as illustrated in this NASA chart hosted by Wikipedia. I think that when a moon begins to have that effect, it should be classified as a planet.
Currently, the Earth's barycenter is three-fourths of the way to its surface, causing it to sort of wobble, rather than fully orbit an invisible point. This is like an analogy: This is like a Chippendale stripper doing a pelvic thrust, rather than running around in a circle.
Earth's orbit around the sun currently makes the sun wobble in a barely perceptible fashion. Jupiter's orbit around the sun, however, causes the sun to orbit a point about 7% above its surface. I think that there should be a new class of planets for the purposes of describing a planet that makes a star orbit itself in this manner.
Clearly, all brown dwarfs orbiting a star would also have a similar or greater effect. The best way to describe it, in my opinion, would be by merely affixing "co-orbital" to describe a planet altering the sun's orbit in this fashion, or a brown dwarf orbiting a star doing this.
If this causes a planet to be "co-orbital" for only part of its orbit, or a natural satellite to be a planet for part of its orbit, in some eccentric situations, that's fine with me. There's one other issue with the new definition that makes me uncertain, though. EL61 is a "minor planet" that has a very oblong shape caused by its own orbit around the sun. If it were in a slower, closer orbit, its own gravity would almost certainly be enough to warp it into a nearly spherical shape. Should EL61 be considered a planet, despite its problem?
There are already 88 constellations with arbitrary, zigzagging boundaries between them used by the International Astronomical Union for classifying stars. Considering that two methods of naming stars uses the genitive Latin form of that constellation's name, the Latin genitive form must be memorized as well.
The best method of memorization for me was to construct a table with the constellation name in one column and the Latin genitive form in the other. Considering this, if there were 53 planets, for the purposes of memorization, I would create a table with their names in the first column, their adjectival names (i.e. Jovian moon) in one column, and the Greek root for the planet in the third. For example, the study of Jupiter is called zenology, as opposed to geology, from Greek's Zeus.
Though you may not hear the word zenology used much now, as maps of Mars become more and more detailed everytime a new satellite is sent there, the field of areography becomes more advanced. There's even an entire Wikipedia article discussing it already. I suspect science's understanding of zenology will rise greatly by the time the Juno mission is completed.
Also, if the number of planets rises into the hundreds, then there'll still be no point in knowing their names except for the most classic original eight or nine. They'll still be there. Who actually bothers to have the names of all other planets' moons memorized?
Planet: A celestial object orbiting a star that is massive enough for its own gravity to warp itself into a nearly round, spherical shape. A planet may not be massive enough to initiate thermonuclear fusion. In order for a pair of celestial objects to be considered a double planet, in addition to meeting the forementioned criteria, the barycenter of both objects must be located above their surfaces.
Planetary systems orbit a barycenter, or their center of mass. Usually that center of mass is located at the center of the planet, but in the case of Pluto, the gravity of its "moons" pull the barycenter above the surface. As a result, Pluto is perpetually orbiting the center of mass of the planetary system, as illustrated in a chart located in the Wikipedia article. This is why Charon and Pluto are being considered double planets.
I think that's the best set of criteria that can be offered. Why is the idea of over 50 planets so abhorent? Why must size and the number of planets be decided arbitrarily? We might as well use Isaac Asimov's mesoplanet suggestion, in which all objects with radii between Ceres and Mercury are mesoplanets, if this is how it is to be decided.
The science fiction novel Manna is available online, and I linked to it in my Slashdot story contribution. In it, Manna v1.0 speaks to workers through a headset, rather than Hyperactive Bob's touchscreen, constantly telling employees to clean toilets, flip burgers, and such with detailed instructions. Even in break times, it issues a reminder on when the break is up every minute, and consciously staggers break times to avoid human interaction, which would cause inefficiencies due to workers not wanting to leave.
When the job is done, they are supposed to say, "OK," to the headset to get more instructions. Presumably they still have manager oversight in the story, and presumably likewise in these real restaurants, except "OK" is a button on a computer screen. They probably still have a manager there for oversight that can call if anything goes wrong in the software. Just like in Chapter 1, they had employees of the Manna manufacturer's company watch the first restaurant where the software was being beta tested.
Look on the discussion page of Lutheranism and you see a group of editors that wrote the article talking about expanding the article. It probably would have been longer, if it weren't shortened for conciseness by having the content of the "history of Lutheranism" section moved into a completely separate article.
They summarized this in the main article, Lutheranism. When this occurs, they would call "history of Lutheranism" the subarticle and "Lutheranism" the parent article. "Lutheranism in the 1600s" might be a subarticle of "history of Lutheranism" in the future, when "history of Lutheranism" grows too long.
This is increasingly a main method of article growth on Wikipedia, rarer when compared to someone creating an article never evee mentioned in Wikipedia at all. For that I link to Claas Cougar as an example, the largest mower in the world (certainly not for lawns).
I think, when these subarticles are taken into account, I think they should probably all be grouped into one unit for the purposes of comparing content. That doesn't really matter in this case, though, because Truthiness has its own subarticle anyway.
I wouldn't be so sure they'll hold on for long. The entry says, "Currently, De Beers is involved in a joint venture that is developing a diamond prospect in Canada," so I think they're after them. I'd rather buy from the Canadian company, just because I like its Indiana Jones-like founding story.
10 geologist nerds with a dream go on a trip to the Northwest Canadian wilderness to mine for ore in a place one thought barren and worthless and end up filthy rich. When The History Channel interviewed them, they all looked dressed in filthy rags and it seemed like they hadn't spent even a bit. They're owners of a multi-billion dollar company and what do they do with the money? They donate it to charity, just like Henry Paulson!
If you had watched that special on The History Channel's Modern Marvels about the history of diamond mining, you'd know that diamonds are valuable because of the De Beers mining company obtaining a monopoly on diamond mining by gradually buying out and merging with all the other diamond companies in South Africa, and gradually the world. They then instituted a propaganda campaign in order to get couples to buy the diamonds, while releasing only a set number of diamonds every year, thus keeping demand artificially high.
Their monopoly was threatened by the Soviet Union finding diamonds in modern Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, De Beers bought out nearly all the diamonds that had fallen into the hands of former Soviet countries. In the 21st century they are threatened by a Canadian diamond company founded by a Canadian geologist once thought to be crazy for suspecting the presence of diamonds in Northwest Canada.
They were finally fined $5 million by the Department of Justice with their monopolistic tactics, but obviously that's like the EU fining Microsoft. I think people are finally waking up and smelling the coffee, realizing that these gems are merely worthless shiny rocks, though the advent of artificial diamonds doesn't hurt.
Exactly. Please mod the parent up---I know it's hard getting mod points being an anonymous coward. The Learning Channel used to show educational programming like The Discovery Channel, but then it slowly began to falter and began showing arts and crafts channels. Now its timeslots are flooded with HGTV style programs. There are only four television channels on basic cable worth watching now: The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, C-SPAN, and C-SPAN 2.
The Discovery Channel and The History Channels' schedules are sporadic, so you have to check the schedules for a good documentary, but Modern Marvels has been consistently good. C-SPAN shows live coverage of the House of Representatives, while C-SPAN 2 shows live coverage of the Senate. True to the parent's word, both C-SPAN and C-SPAN 2 are available on the Internet at www.c-span.org for free, so you need not even a TV to watch.
G4 bought out TechTV and shoved out nearly all the non-gaming technology related programming, in its place putting more Cinamatech and X-Play timeslots, replacing Screensavers with Attack of the Show, and adding the show Cheat!.
Then, when they realized video game players weren't watching because they were playing video games, they began to kill of all their video game shows one by one by replacing them with Star Trek and The Man Show. It's just another useless channel like the rest of them now.
Bush's arguement for funding stem cell research that entirely uses stem cells from aborted fetuses was that it "leads to a slippery slope to purposely engaging in murder for scientific research." By that logic, we should also ban Harvard Medical School from researching with cadavers, for fear that allowing that will lead to people being stabbed in the face and dragged back to an imagined meat locker for scientific research.
I was watching C-SPAN 2, an American basic cable station that shows U.S. Senate debates live whenever the Senate is in session, and sure enough, Senator Tom Harkin likened Bush's actions to when the Pope banned scientific research on cadavers in the 1200s, calling it "unnatural," perhaps delaying human anatomical standing for hundreds of years until someone saw fit to violate the Pope's ruling, dig up a human body, slice it open, look through the muscle tissue, and write about it in a book...
Your literacy and coherency match that of your arguement. If you keep up with the headlines, you would have found out that a few scientists took the opportunity to refute the claims of a leading Senate proponent that adult stem cell research is sufficient to cure most diseases. Said the scientists, adult stem cells have only been suggested by research to cure only seven diseases thus far, and most of them are skin diseases. Though grateful for adult stem cell research funding, they don't really expect to find much.
I had left the comment. The person that wrote it had reverted a perfectly good article back to the Zango-written version just to add some comment to the bottom. It's still harmful, and got the person that did it blocked for three hours, but I'm pretty sure that the person at the computer won't even notice it.
Less than thirty minutes ago at the time of writing, Zango once again edited the Wikipedia article on Zango messenger. See this edit, which has been reverted by other users. They wrote in the edit summary, what Wikipedia asks its editors to write to justify edits and explain changes, "Fact checking and bias redirection."
The same IP address wrote on the article's discussion page, "29 June 2006, reworked the corporate advertising copy for accuracy. I hope you don't mind me having a little fun with these shills. If you object to my copy, please exchange it for your own, so long as it is not advertising and/or misinformation in Zango's favour. Thank you and good night. [Anonymous]"
They have just admitted to manipulating Wikipedia for corporate advertising. They think they are "anonymous," but this adware company knows not even the concept of IP addresses. I am opening a discussion with Wikipedia administrators at this URL with the intention of getting all Zango IP addresses permanently blocked from Wikipedia. Please observe and provide input if you feel you have something useful to say.
Oh, my, I'm sorry if it looks like I'm karma whoring, but this post is much more urgent. The last post about Zango mentioned that they had created a Zango Messenger article in Wikipedia in 2005, which has since been fixed by Wikipedia administrators.
It turns out that was not an isolated incident. If you look at this article revision from April 2006, you will see that they have been at it much more recently. I suspect that Zango is doing a full-out campaign on any "Web 2.0" website, any website that anyone can edit or contribute to. I would not be surprised if they had also been marketing on Digg---I think I have even seen them there, in fact!
The evidence for a lawsuit against their company for their destructive marketing practices is mounting...
As an extension to my previous post, I should add that, with this MySpace incident, there is obviously no "accident" undergoing at Zango. Obviously there should be some provision of law floating about making them vulnerable to some sort of law suit for these marketing tactics. Someone should find it and sue, perhaps?
This isn't the first time I've seen them engage in this. I first encountered Zango when its predecessor company, 180 Solutions, told me to install Install026.exe, which had 180 Search Solutions infect my computer with its spyware. I had been installing a video game at the time, while browsing the webcomic hosting site Keenspot, so I thought it was part of the installation process and clicked the button. My computer fell to the spyware and I had to end up doing a system restore. Since then 180 Solutions has merged with another spyware company to become Zango.
Keenspot suffered massive outrage, and coldly responded that they outsource their advertising to the Burstnet company, which used iFrames to distribute their ads, so they had no control over it, and that everyone is evil and stealing when they use Firefox's AdBlock.
The next time I encountered them was when I went to the website Newgrounds, which apparently had become infested with spyware since the last time I visited, and said I needed to install Zango to access portions of the site. This spyware problem was in the Wikipedia entry for a few months, but now it appears to have been removed?
The last time, incidentally, was when I was searching Wikipedia. I came across this revision of a Wikipedia article on Zango Messenger, a spyware laden IM service made by Zango. Look how glowing its review is. Wikipedia records the IP addresses of every user that edits when they aren't logged in, and when you look at the IP address that made the edit, you will see that the address traces back to a company by the name of "180 SOLUTIONS HOOKED-2", with 180 Solutions being the company's old name!
It's hosted by Time Warner Telecom, by the way. That's another reason not to use AOL.
I played Puzzle Pirates, and it seems to me most of those 2 million accounts are probably old ones that were abandoned after their owners, having tried the game out, got bored after realizing there were less than ten puzzles that get tired quickly. Are those active accounts, they say? I'd be more impressed if they were.
But at least it's free (sort of). Congratulations, you have Runescape and Anarchy Online quality gaming awaiting you.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a reason for non-editors to have a username. Logged in users can change how the layout of Wikipedia appears to them through this page. Here are previews of different layouts, for non-logged in users:
Nostalgia
Chick
MySkin
Cologne Blue
Classic
The default you probably have on right now is called MonoBook.
Logged in users can also change how math equations are displayed, how large images should be displayed in pages, change the date and time edits are made in article histories from UTC to your local time, and also manipulate Wikipedia's search engine for the number of hits per page and lines per hit. You can also change whether it should underline internal links to other pages and whether Wikipedia pages should display a "table of contents."
In short, you have to sign up for Wikipedia's appearance to become very customizable.
Donations by governments have been rejected as a risk to its impartiality, or perceived impartiality, at least.
Wikipedia has a process for electing administrators from amongst the experienced Wikipedia editors in the community. They also have a process for removing them when they misbehave. A problem might be that they aren't even required to give their real name, let alone their qualifications. One might suggest that standards should be stricter and professional experience should be required in order to tighten standards, but most of the 900 administrators already elected would disagree for obvious reasons.
These administrators also tend to be the ones that say that administrators make up too much of a percentage of the community for the amount required to maintain the project, and thus restrictions on promoting future administrators should be encouraged.
How hard is it to post a YouTube whistleblower video from Mars?
Administrators are already elected by the community. Administratorship has been claimed to be like a "janitorial" job, at least if it's done right. Delete an article marked for immediate deletion. Look at an Article for Deletion debate and close it according to the consensus. Looking at the discussion page of an article to see if the community has reached a decision has been reached on updating an article should be just another "janitorial" job. Processes have recently been put in place that allow the community to vote to demote an administrator. There are approximately 900 administrators.
The next step above an administrator is a Bureaucrat. Bureaucrats have powers to promote users to administrators and bureaucrats at the community's request, to change a Wikipedia username at that user's request, and to flag accounts as being used by "bots," computer programs designed to check for common spelling errors, revert obvious vandalism, or add a link to the same Wikipedia article in a different language. Stewards are a level above bureaucrats and have the power to change the status of anyone on any Wikimedia project: Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikimedia Incubator. Bureaucrats and stewards are also elected by the community.
As the above positions are supposed to function as "janitors," Wikipedia also has an elected group of users that are the final authority in resolving disputes among Wikipedia users called the Arbitration Committee. At the beginning of Wikipedia, the committee was entirely appointed by Jimmy Wales, but since then gradually each "seat" on the Committee has been opened to be decided in an election. There is only one seat left that was appointed by Jimmy Wales, and his "term" ends in 2007. Thus, in this area, Wikipedia is becoming more open and democratic.
Charged with managing the entire Wikimedia project is the Wikimedia Board of Trustees. Two seats are elected, two seats are appointed by Jimmy Wales, and one seat is held by Jimmy Wales, chairman of the Board for life. The Board has elected a vice-chair from amongst themselves that would take over if Jimmy Wales suddenly died or was assassinated, but it isn't publicly available who that is. One Board member that had been elected by the community has resigned, and several more elected seats are now being added to the Board. Wikimedia is currently in the middle of an election for these seats.
There is a vast bureaucracy behind the Wikipedia "anarchy." Look over here and you'll see they even have little rubber stamps ("templates," they call them) that they throw on discussion pages to mark an article's quality.
The Klingon Wikipedia was started independently by a few administrators and Klingon speakers, and then it was shut down by Wikimedia by the time the people at the top noticed it existed with 62 articles. They decided fictional language versions of Wikimedia projects should not be hosted on Wikimedia servers (20 of which were courteously donated by Yahoo!, with the rest being bought through donor money).
Curiously, that hasn't stopped a user at Wikimedia Incubator, which was started last month to host test wikis for trial periods before they become official projects, from creating a Wikipedia in the fictional Qenya language from Tolkien's books. I wonder how long it'll be 'til that one's noticed.
If the moon going further away from the Earth causes the barycenter of Earth to drift outside its surface, then the Earth will be orbiting a point outside itself, with its orbit becoming greater the farther the barycenter drifts, until it peaks at one point. This is similar to Pluto constantly orbiting a point outside itself, as illustrated in this NASA chart hosted by Wikipedia. I think that when a moon begins to have that effect, it should be classified as a planet.
Currently, the Earth's barycenter is three-fourths of the way to its surface, causing it to sort of wobble, rather than fully orbit an invisible point. This is like an analogy: This is like a Chippendale stripper doing a pelvic thrust, rather than running around in a circle.
Earth's orbit around the sun currently makes the sun wobble in a barely perceptible fashion. Jupiter's orbit around the sun, however, causes the sun to orbit a point about 7% above its surface. I think that there should be a new class of planets for the purposes of describing a planet that makes a star orbit itself in this manner.
Clearly, all brown dwarfs orbiting a star would also have a similar or greater effect. The best way to describe it, in my opinion, would be by merely affixing "co-orbital" to describe a planet altering the sun's orbit in this fashion, or a brown dwarf orbiting a star doing this.
If this causes a planet to be "co-orbital" for only part of its orbit, or a natural satellite to be a planet for part of its orbit, in some eccentric situations, that's fine with me. There's one other issue with the new definition that makes me uncertain, though. EL61 is a "minor planet" that has a very oblong shape caused by its own orbit around the sun. If it were in a slower, closer orbit, its own gravity would almost certainly be enough to warp it into a nearly spherical shape. Should EL61 be considered a planet, despite its problem?
There are already 88 constellations with arbitrary, zigzagging boundaries between them used by the International Astronomical Union for classifying stars. Considering that two methods of naming stars uses the genitive Latin form of that constellation's name, the Latin genitive form must be memorized as well.
The best method of memorization for me was to construct a table with the constellation name in one column and the Latin genitive form in the other. Considering this, if there were 53 planets, for the purposes of memorization, I would create a table with their names in the first column, their adjectival names (i.e. Jovian moon) in one column, and the Greek root for the planet in the third. For example, the study of Jupiter is called zenology, as opposed to geology, from Greek's Zeus.
Though you may not hear the word zenology used much now, as maps of Mars become more and more detailed everytime a new satellite is sent there, the field of areography becomes more advanced. There's even an entire Wikipedia article discussing it already. I suspect science's understanding of zenology will rise greatly by the time the Juno mission is completed.
Also, if the number of planets rises into the hundreds, then there'll still be no point in knowing their names except for the most classic original eight or nine. They'll still be there. Who actually bothers to have the names of all other planets' moons memorized?
Planet: A celestial object orbiting a star that is massive enough for its own gravity to warp itself into a nearly round, spherical shape. A planet may not be massive enough to initiate thermonuclear fusion. In order for a pair of celestial objects to be considered a double planet, in addition to meeting the forementioned criteria, the barycenter of both objects must be located above their surfaces. Planetary systems orbit a barycenter, or their center of mass. Usually that center of mass is located at the center of the planet, but in the case of Pluto, the gravity of its "moons" pull the barycenter above the surface. As a result, Pluto is perpetually orbiting the center of mass of the planetary system, as illustrated in a chart located in the Wikipedia article. This is why Charon and Pluto are being considered double planets. I think that's the best set of criteria that can be offered. Why is the idea of over 50 planets so abhorent? Why must size and the number of planets be decided arbitrarily? We might as well use Isaac Asimov's mesoplanet suggestion, in which all objects with radii between Ceres and Mercury are mesoplanets, if this is how it is to be decided.
The science fiction novel Manna is available online, and I linked to it in my Slashdot story contribution. In it, Manna v1.0 speaks to workers through a headset, rather than Hyperactive Bob's touchscreen, constantly telling employees to clean toilets, flip burgers, and such with detailed instructions. Even in break times, it issues a reminder on when the break is up every minute, and consciously staggers break times to avoid human interaction, which would cause inefficiencies due to workers not wanting to leave.
When the job is done, they are supposed to say, "OK," to the headset to get more instructions. Presumably they still have manager oversight in the story, and presumably likewise in these real restaurants, except "OK" is a button on a computer screen. They probably still have a manager there for oversight that can call if anything goes wrong in the software. Just like in Chapter 1, they had employees of the Manna manufacturer's company watch the first restaurant where the software was being beta tested.
Look on the discussion page of Lutheranism and you see a group of editors that wrote the article talking about expanding the article. It probably would have been longer, if it weren't shortened for conciseness by having the content of the "history of Lutheranism" section moved into a completely separate article.
They summarized this in the main article, Lutheranism. When this occurs, they would call "history of Lutheranism" the subarticle and "Lutheranism" the parent article. "Lutheranism in the 1600s" might be a subarticle of "history of Lutheranism" in the future, when "history of Lutheranism" grows too long.
This is increasingly a main method of article growth on Wikipedia, rarer when compared to someone creating an article never evee mentioned in Wikipedia at all. For that I link to Claas Cougar as an example, the largest mower in the world (certainly not for lawns).
I think, when these subarticles are taken into account, I think they should probably all be grouped into one unit for the purposes of comparing content. That doesn't really matter in this case, though, because Truthiness has its own subarticle anyway.
I wouldn't be so sure they'll hold on for long. The entry says, "Currently, De Beers is involved in a joint venture that is developing a diamond prospect in Canada," so I think they're after them. I'd rather buy from the Canadian company, just because I like its Indiana Jones-like founding story.
10 geologist nerds with a dream go on a trip to the Northwest Canadian wilderness to mine for ore in a place one thought barren and worthless and end up filthy rich. When The History Channel interviewed them, they all looked dressed in filthy rags and it seemed like they hadn't spent even a bit. They're owners of a multi-billion dollar company and what do they do with the money? They donate it to charity, just like Henry Paulson!
For you registration whiners.
If you had watched that special on The History Channel's Modern Marvels about the history of diamond mining, you'd know that diamonds are valuable because of the De Beers mining company obtaining a monopoly on diamond mining by gradually buying out and merging with all the other diamond companies in South Africa, and gradually the world. They then instituted a propaganda campaign in order to get couples to buy the diamonds, while releasing only a set number of diamonds every year, thus keeping demand artificially high.
Their monopoly was threatened by the Soviet Union finding diamonds in modern Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, De Beers bought out nearly all the diamonds that had fallen into the hands of former Soviet countries. In the 21st century they are threatened by a Canadian diamond company founded by a Canadian geologist once thought to be crazy for suspecting the presence of diamonds in Northwest Canada.
They were finally fined $5 million by the Department of Justice with their monopolistic tactics, but obviously that's like the EU fining Microsoft. I think people are finally waking up and smelling the coffee, realizing that these gems are merely worthless shiny rocks, though the advent of artificial diamonds doesn't hurt.
Here, Wikipedia has an entry.
Exactly. Please mod the parent up---I know it's hard getting mod points being an anonymous coward. The Learning Channel used to show educational programming like The Discovery Channel, but then it slowly began to falter and began showing arts and crafts channels. Now its timeslots are flooded with HGTV style programs. There are only four television channels on basic cable worth watching now: The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, C-SPAN, and C-SPAN 2.
The Discovery Channel and The History Channels' schedules are sporadic, so you have to check the schedules for a good documentary, but Modern Marvels has been consistently good. C-SPAN shows live coverage of the House of Representatives, while C-SPAN 2 shows live coverage of the Senate. True to the parent's word, both C-SPAN and C-SPAN 2 are available on the Internet at www.c-span.org for free, so you need not even a TV to watch.
G4 bought out TechTV and shoved out nearly all the non-gaming technology related programming, in its place putting more Cinamatech and X-Play timeslots, replacing Screensavers with Attack of the Show, and adding the show Cheat!.
Then, when they realized video game players weren't watching because they were playing video games, they began to kill of all their video game shows one by one by replacing them with Star Trek and The Man Show. It's just another useless channel like the rest of them now.
Bush's arguement for funding stem cell research that entirely uses stem cells from aborted fetuses was that it "leads to a slippery slope to purposely engaging in murder for scientific research." By that logic, we should also ban Harvard Medical School from researching with cadavers, for fear that allowing that will lead to people being stabbed in the face and dragged back to an imagined meat locker for scientific research.
I was watching C-SPAN 2, an American basic cable station that shows U.S. Senate debates live whenever the Senate is in session, and sure enough, Senator Tom Harkin likened Bush's actions to when the Pope banned scientific research on cadavers in the 1200s, calling it "unnatural," perhaps delaying human anatomical standing for hundreds of years until someone saw fit to violate the Pope's ruling, dig up a human body, slice it open, look through the muscle tissue, and write about it in a book...
Your literacy and coherency match that of your arguement. If you keep up with the headlines, you would have found out that a few scientists took the opportunity to refute the claims of a leading Senate proponent that adult stem cell research is sufficient to cure most diseases. Said the scientists, adult stem cells have only been suggested by research to cure only seven diseases thus far, and most of them are skin diseases. Though grateful for adult stem cell research funding, they don't really expect to find much.
Making that computer must have been harder than getting a story from MSN posted on the main page of Slashdot!
I had left the comment. The person that wrote it had reverted a perfectly good article back to the Zango-written version just to add some comment to the bottom. It's still harmful, and got the person that did it blocked for three hours, but I'm pretty sure that the person at the computer won't even notice it.
More developments:
Less than thirty minutes ago at the time of writing, Zango once again edited the Wikipedia article on Zango messenger. See this edit, which has been reverted by other users. They wrote in the edit summary, what Wikipedia asks its editors to write to justify edits and explain changes, "Fact checking and bias redirection."
The same IP address wrote on the article's discussion page, "29 June 2006, reworked the corporate advertising copy for accuracy. I hope you don't mind me having a little fun with these shills. If you object to my copy, please exchange it for your own, so long as it is not advertising and/or misinformation in Zango's favour. Thank you and good night. [Anonymous]"
They have just admitted to manipulating Wikipedia for corporate advertising. They think they are "anonymous," but this adware company knows not even the concept of IP addresses. I am opening a discussion with Wikipedia administrators at this URL with the intention of getting all Zango IP addresses permanently blocked from Wikipedia. Please observe and provide input if you feel you have something useful to say.
Oh, my, I'm sorry if it looks like I'm karma whoring, but this post is much more urgent. The last post about Zango mentioned that they had created a Zango Messenger article in Wikipedia in 2005, which has since been fixed by Wikipedia administrators.
It turns out that was not an isolated incident. If you look at this article revision from April 2006, you will see that they have been at it much more recently. I suspect that Zango is doing a full-out campaign on any "Web 2.0" website, any website that anyone can edit or contribute to. I would not be surprised if they had also been marketing on Digg---I think I have even seen them there, in fact!
The evidence for a lawsuit against their company for their destructive marketing practices is mounting...
As an extension to my previous post, I should add that, with this MySpace incident, there is obviously no "accident" undergoing at Zango. Obviously there should be some provision of law floating about making them vulnerable to some sort of law suit for these marketing tactics. Someone should find it and sue, perhaps?
This isn't the first time I've seen them engage in this. I first encountered Zango when its predecessor company, 180 Solutions, told me to install Install026.exe, which had 180 Search Solutions infect my computer with its spyware. I had been installing a video game at the time, while browsing the webcomic hosting site Keenspot, so I thought it was part of the installation process and clicked the button. My computer fell to the spyware and I had to end up doing a system restore. Since then 180 Solutions has merged with another spyware company to become Zango.
Keenspot suffered massive outrage, and coldly responded that they outsource their advertising to the Burstnet company, which used iFrames to distribute their ads, so they had no control over it, and that everyone is evil and stealing when they use Firefox's AdBlock.
The next time I encountered them was when I went to the website Newgrounds, which apparently had become infested with spyware since the last time I visited, and said I needed to install Zango to access portions of the site. This spyware problem was in the Wikipedia entry for a few months, but now it appears to have been removed?
The last time, incidentally, was when I was searching Wikipedia. I came across this revision of a Wikipedia article on Zango Messenger, a spyware laden IM service made by Zango. Look how glowing its review is. Wikipedia records the IP addresses of every user that edits when they aren't logged in, and when you look at the IP address that made the edit, you will see that the address traces back to a company by the name of "180 SOLUTIONS HOOKED-2", with 180 Solutions being the company's old name!
It's hosted by Time Warner Telecom, by the way. That's another reason not to use AOL.
I played Puzzle Pirates, and it seems to me most of those 2 million accounts are probably old ones that were abandoned after their owners, having tried the game out, got bored after realizing there were less than ten puzzles that get tired quickly. Are those active accounts, they say? I'd be more impressed if they were.
But at least it's free (sort of). Congratulations, you have Runescape and Anarchy Online quality gaming awaiting you.