I knew WV was different when Bob posted songs you need to know and I knew none of them. My knowledge needs an upgrade before I revisit the southern areas.

Unfortunately I cannot travel until 12 weeks after they don't change my medications AND declare me fit to do so, and even then my 'medical' coverage is for a max of 6 weeks at a time.

They may pull my Canuckistani citizenship, it takes over an hour to drink one beer, and then it dries my mouth out and makes me thirsty. Oh well on to the second coffee this morning, takes an hour a cup too. I am the cheap date personified now, I resemble the wife banging back her 2 gins a night.

Why are there no seniors discounts on beer?

Irresponsible? You guys must have never flown an airplane after smoking a joint!

Wikipedia, for a period of time we can not visit it...

I guess what bothers me is that someone could do what Martin suggested and just type in garbage, or info that appears to be correct but isn’t. I personally can’t relate to the “fun” in doing that, but then again I can’t relate to a lot of malicious things people do.

So many people in general and students in particular rely on Wikipedia as source of legitimate info. I was obviously naïve to think there was at least some criteria for being able to post.

As a side note, these spam posts seem to me to be much worse than ever before. It would be nice if the moderators could or would kill more of these things when the posters obviously aren’t new members.

It is worth what you paid for it.

As a generalization I agree with Mac. On the other hand I paid for a roofing job, 1900 bucks, 25 year asphalt shingles, lasted 7 years.

On some occasions we need more lawyers like the US. On the other hand I save about 200 hours a month not listening to rapid fire talk about what the drug I'm taking might do to me, here they say, "Read the label"....

Wikipedia is, in most cases where I've used it, is a decent source. On the other hand I have a set of Dad's 1965 Encyclopedia Americana in 20 some volumes that is a bit dated. If you want it pay the shipping, handling fee, and $200 bucks...na that big a sucker wasn't born every minute....

I used to teach students that when researching a subject, we should naturally suspect ALL data, regardless of source.

Recall the situation where the medical community had the wrong number of chromosomes counted for the human cell. This mistake propagated in good old fashioned hardbound books for decades before a young student actually recounted them and found a different sum.

Then there is the problem that we have as human beings where sheer hubris, or ego, prejudices or fill-in-the-blank leads us to believe all sorts of malarky concerning a particular subject regardless of provability via reproduction of result in published experiment.

The *other* problem is sinister.


--Mac

most teachers do advise the students that Wiki is an uncontrolled source.

One advantage of such a source is that it is not under the control of someone with an agenda who will present the information in a way that fits his agenda. You can add an alternative point to any article, as Bob mentioned in his his original post.

The law of large numbers says that the larger the sample, the closer the average is to reality. If your performance appraisal at work is dished out by one person, it may mean that you are a bad employee.. but it may also mean that the boss doesn't like you.

If your appraisal is handled by a team and ALL of them give you a bad review, it narrows down the source of the problem quite a bit.

It's statistically less likely that EVERYONE will be wrong at the same time.. but even if they are, Wiki gives the lone ranger an opportunity to add the missing piece of information that may set the record straight. If nothing else it is an exercise in viewing a picture that is larger than your own world view.

Umm ...

The original headline appears to be of more -> relevance than I originally expected. The electronic intifada seems on ...

Having contributed to Wikipedia pages, I can vouch that some of my information is still on the pages. However, when I tried to get PG Music's PTPA a little bit of notoriety by adding it to a list of DAW software providers, the information was rather quickly removed by an autocratic 'page master' or whatever he called himself.

His justification for doing so was that there were not enough outside references to PG's own webpages to qualify for Wikipedia's 'notoriety' criteria.

After that episode of online arguing, I gave up entering anything into Wikipedia, though I'm still a user.

My content that is still alive and well on Wikipedia are on two very unrelated pages:

I contributed content to the FAWM page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_Album_Writing_Month

And on the explorer, Aimé Bonpland's page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aim%C3%A9_Bonpland

You might be able to see the on-line shouting match between me and the autocrat who ruled my content out of the Music Sequencer page. If you do a 'view history' on the page, you can see my name Rockstar not and then Scott.Wheeler right after mine, where he said that PTPA was not 'notable' and removed it from the list of music sequencer softwares after I had added it. Look around April 20 2007 and you'll see it.

Looks like Mr. Wheeler has given up being the ruler of all things music sequencer in Wikipedia based on the edit history of that page. Perhaps a more adventurous soul might want to put RealBand and PTPA onto the list.

As has been pointed out earlier in the thread, it's rather easy to do.

Whether Mr. Wheeler was or was not too autocratic is up for debate. In a way, he felt he was doing right by Wikipedia, I'm sure. I disagree, but partial fault lies in PG Music's lack of product placement/reviews in 'independent' sources.

-Scott

I asked my son the perpetual student who's about 4 months from his Phd what they do about wikipedia, in that he marks on average, about 300 papers a month from undergrads. He says it's become easy to spot the fakers who cut and paste, and that often he can just type in a piece of an arcane sentence in the submitted work and he gets a hit on wikipedia. He said usually they don't argue much about sources, but more over the fact that entire papers or sections of them are cut and paste jobs. He claims he gets about 1 a month, and usually in September the first year students all get stuff sent back the first time, and then they are careful after that.

As to references, due to the fact he's been at anthropology for 11 years now, he says he knows almost for sure that something is missing the quotation marks and source, mostly because the same subjects and sources have been used for years.

I asked about his contributing something to a wiki and got the academic stare, that happens when Dad is stupid enough to think someone with his level of education would stoop there. Odd.....

Maybe that's some anthropological idiosyncrasy. Wikipedia is otherwise teeming with academic expert entries - check out some of their math related sites ...

I'm a math genius, when it comes to counting change.

After that I'm able to balance the money I owe.

Beyond that....forget it. I was told in Grade 10 that if I promised to never take math again they would pass me. Took Latin and German instead. Always got 100 in bookeeping/accounting though. Oh well....

I'm an old editor of the spanish Wikipedia. Nowadays, I'm a retired user, for many reasons; However, despite of its many problems, I still think that Wikipedia is a useful place to start finding some basic information on neutral, non-controversial topics.

Peace,

Though I view it with mistrust on controversial topics, and squint thoughtfully on others, it's rather useful to me, and it's my opinion that the bad press is overblown.

Wikipedia is useful to academics. PhD students seem to love it, particularly on home exams. Wiki stuff is quite easy to spot, tho, as it is quite difficult to paraphrase passages that have been paraphrased and re-paraphrased. On a lighter note, The Waterboys's main man Mike Scott tried to correct his own wiki profile. Ah, read more about it here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/mar/23/popandrock2

Jens