This is kind of a stupid policy to insist on. Wikipedia as I see it has two main benefits over other references:
1. Accessability
2. Vast amounts of common knowledge (as a result of #1)
And the latter is the really unique part, since if you just want to know what something is or what the popular perception of something is, Wikipedia is almost certain to know. Before Wikipedia you would've been left in the dark because for casual inquiries it's not worth the time to do research, and for most subjects it's really unlikely that anything has been published anyway.
Articles on topics where there are good sources available (like Biology pages) are a different matter, but these are the vast minority, and it should much easier to apply restrictions to just these. Seems like a good feature would be requests for an article to have its restrictiveness bumped up, in the case that someone is making good faith edits and seeing others significantly reduce the quality. This as opposed to just flagging someone else's bad edit and hoping that somehow it gets corrected.
This is hardly the case. Most mathematicians (yes, even "serious" ones) realize that mathematics is not exclusively writing down a series of logical statements which prove difficult theorems. The lifeforce of mathematics, and thus the mathematician, is doing so and then *communicating* those results to their fellow mathematicians, and indeed to the rest of the world. I suspect that most (but obviously not all) mathematicians would be giddy with delight at so many people taking interest in their field of expertise (their work in particular), and the opportunity to talk about it at length. Further, for reasons not quite so abstract, mathematicians and mathematics departments rely on funding, so it behooves mathematicians to self-aggrandize -- let people know how big of a deal this is, why it was so important, and why people should keep paying them to keep doing it.
Indeed. It's notable that apparently the three other Fields Medalists' aren't loners, but strongly collaborative researchers. Perelman is more the odd man out in this regard, though this probably wouldn't have been the case in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget Expressionism:
... the Scream of the Chesapeake Bay.
There's another big difference: the dramatic content was not changed. Ah yes, all the good old 60s sexism and chauvinism still intact!
This is kind of a stupid policy to insist on. Wikipedia as I see it has two main benefits over other references:
1. Accessability
2. Vast amounts of common knowledge (as a result of #1)
And the latter is the really unique part, since if you just want to know what something is or what the popular perception of something is, Wikipedia is almost certain to know. Before Wikipedia you would've been left in the dark because for casual inquiries it's not worth the time to do research, and for most subjects it's really unlikely that anything has been published anyway.
Articles on topics where there are good sources available (like Biology pages) are a different matter, but these are the vast minority, and it should much easier to apply restrictions to just these. Seems like a good feature would be requests for an article to have its restrictiveness bumped up, in the case that someone is making good faith edits and seeing others significantly reduce the quality. This as opposed to just flagging someone else's bad edit and hoping that somehow it gets corrected.