Your explanation that Japanese yen "depreciated" against US dollar
after the Plaza Accord is an error. It was "appreciated," in other
words, the value of Jppanese yen increased against US dollar.
You say on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord:
The Plaza Accord was an agrrement signed on September 22, 1985 to make the Japanese yen cheaper.
In 1985, 1 US dollar was exchanged for 216 yen according to the table on the same page. But the relative value of yen kept rising (appreciated, in other words) mainly because of the Plaza Accord until it reached 132 yen to a dollar in1988 according to said table. If the intent of the Accord was to cheapen yen as you say, it obviously failed to achieve the objective completely. Actually, the intent was to raise the value of yen against US dollar.
Yen has been going up steadly with some ups and downs here and there against US dollar since 1985, and it is now 108 yen to a US dollar, or a great appreciation, not depreciation. Yen's value increased more than three times since 1945 when it was fixed at 360 yen to a dollar in 1945.
Now, everyone is concerned abou Chinese currency which is artificially suppressed for the benefit of Chinese export, by fixing it to US dollar. People are saying that now is the time for the second Plaza Accord to free up the exchange ratio of Chinese currency against US dollar.
Minoru Mochizuki
I moved an image of a sports car to talk, because it contained a
copyright notice, and this conversation followed:
> I'm not sure we ought to use a copyrighted
> picture. --Uncle Ed 21:28, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)
--> "permission to use with credits given" as it
--> says in the text you get if you click the picture.
--> We could perhaps replace "(c)" with "Photo by" if
--> that would make you feel better. // Liftarn
What's the policy? CAN WE assume that if someone assures us that (a)
they got, or (b) they are granting, permission -- then it's okay? MUST
WE show the copyright notice?
This reminds me about the guy who posted his own copyrighted article on
credit repair.
Ed Poor
Tarquin wrote:
>I agree with everything mav said here.
>I just *HATE* the name Nupedia.
>It's the "nu" for "new", and also the fact that "new" won't
>really mean much in, say, 20 years' time.
This thread is no longer about En.Wikipedia in particular. Answer at:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-December/013444.html
--mav
Hi
I just wanted to ask how come when I receive your e-mails it goes to the junk box and has very high risk for junk mail? That kind of bothers me.
Thank you
Linny
An free (GPL) encyclopedia is what we are creating, like it or not.
Already half a dozen other websites use the information our contributors
have put together.
As far as I know, those other websites don't contribute anything back.
But remember, they don't have to: that's what "free" means: we're giving
it away!
The only claim we can make on others is that IF THEY MAKE CHANGES, we
are allowed to get a free copy of their changes. Same as the Gnu/Linux
software project.
So there's nothing wrong with ANYONE burning a DVD with the current
version of Wikipedia, and giving it away to third world schools or
selling it for $50 each at Barnes and Noble. In fact, they can even
censor it by cutting out all the smut or political controversy, if they
want to -- and we have (believe it or not) already agreed in advance
that they can do so.
Did it ever occur to you that we, the content providers, might not be
the best judge of what ought to go into a dead-tree (or burnt-plastic)
hard copy of the encyclopedia?
Ed Poor
I wrote:
> > Until the 19th century, the scientific system was truly open to
> > anyone, and credentials didn't matter much.
And Ray Saintonge responded:
>Was it really open to anyone? The credentials were different but they
>still mattered. As long as the means for the mass communication of
>scientific information were not there, the credentials of the pulpit
>were the ones that mattered. The heresies of a Galileo were not within
>the grasp of the common man; there was no gavel to gavel newspaper
>coverage of his trial
I think Ray has confused "science" with "religion." The "heresy of
Galileo" was not a clash between opposing scientists. It was a clash
between science and religious dogma, in which religious dogma won by
virtue of its ability to imprison, torture and kill dissenters.
Galileo capitulated to the Catholic Church rather than suffer these
violent consequences. The "scientific system" to which I am referring
only emerged as religious authorities lost their power to engage in
this kind of repression, and it did indeed emerge much like the
Wikipedia did, as a system for the accumulation of knowledge in which
credentials had little significance. The Royal Society for the
Improvement of Natural Knowledge, founded in 1660 as England's
official scientific society, drew much of its inspiration from Sir
Francis Bacon's belief that scientific knowledge should come from all
quarters and walks of life. At the time of the society's charter, two
thirds of its members were interested amateurs rather than full-time
scientists. Rather than narrow specialists, scientists of the period
were wide-ranging intellectuals interested in all of the ideas of the
day, from physics to theology. They combined passion for knowledge
with practical interests in commerce, agriculture, and industry. "We
find noble rarities to be every day given in," wrote Bishop Sprat,
the first historian of the Society, "not only by the hands of the
learned, but from the shops of mechanics, voyages of merchants,
ploughs of husbandmen, gardens of gentlemen." That description sounds
uncommonly similar to the description that someone could write of the
Wikipedia today.
Of course, there were limitations to the idea of science being open
to anyone. In the 1700s, literacy was rare and most people were too
preoccupied with daily survival to engage in scientific dabbling or
publishing. Here too, though, there is a parallel to the Wikipedia.
There are no _formal_ barriers to participation in the Wikipedia, but
in practice only people with sufficient time and access to the
Internet are able to contribute, which currently excludes most of the
world's population. (Of course, that's not the fault of the
Wikipedia.)
Ray also wrote:
>There's a problem when a source of information becomes too reliable.
> People become lazy; they stop looking critically at the text in front
>of them; they begin to feel that they don't need to double-check.
I don't think there is any evidence showing that reliable access to
accurate information dulls anyone's critical thinking faculties. In
any case, this problem is merely theoretical for the time being,
since the Wikipedia hasn't reached that level yet.
>Where are these "accredited experts" going to come from. The paradox is
>that the peers who do the peer review for the members of the
>undifferentiated masses cannot come from what are now the acknowledged
>experts. The peer review must come from other members of the
>undifferentiated masses.
I don't understand your reasoning here. Why can't the
"undifferentiated masses" on Wikipedia intentionally recruit the
advice of people who are currently "the acknowledged experts"? In the
rest of the real world, people do this all the time. When we hire a
physician or an attorney or an architect, most of us go to people who
have training, certification and specialized knowledge in those
fields. Just as I don't need to be a surgeon myself in order to find
a good one to take out my appendix, the "undifferentiated masses" on
Wikipedia don't need expertise in everything in order to identify and
recruit individuals who _do_ have that expertise. Of course, this
system won't be error-proof. (Nothing in this world ever is.)
However, it might help improve the quality and reliability of
information presented here.
I wrote:
> > In the future, we may want to have some volunteer committees:
[SNIP]
> > If a dispute arose over a particular
> > article, the committee would be invited to mediate and render an
> > opinion, and if mediation alone was insufficient to resolve the
> > dispute, the committee could even be given authority to impose a
> > binding decision.
Ray responded:
>Perish the thought! Pontifical truth committees! When they mediate and
>render an opinion it is still just an opinion, and it may therby have
>greater weight, but please, no binding decisions. Promoting an
>atmosphere of critical thinking would be a much greater accomplishment.
I realize that the idea of giving "binding" authority to such a
committee is bound to raise concerns, and perhaps I'm thinking too
far into the future. The question of whether and when to delegate
such authority can only be answered after committees of this type
already exist and have been functioning for awhile in a purely
advisory role. I think that any such binding authority should be
given only after careful deliberation, and those in whom it is
entrusted should use it with caution and restraint. However, I think
it is a mistake to imagine that no one here ever has binding
authority over anyone else. We already have a system in place of
sysops who exert such authority, acting under the all-seeing gaze of
Jimbo, our Philosopher King. Just as sysops can step in now to curb
edit wars and vandalism, I think there could be a place in the future
for specialized expert committees to perform similar functions.
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
| Weapons of Mass Deception
--------------------------------
For what it's worth, I think either way looks all right, but the hr was
preferred by the boilerplate at [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation]]. I see
that Eloquence has now changed the template and that's fine (although
I'm wondering a bit how long it's going to take to go through all of
them and change them to the new format).
- Hephaestos
On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 17:57, Timwi wrote:
> (What does "boilerplate" mean anyway, and where does that word come
from?)
Boilerplate is writing that is reused without being changed much from
the original. Programmers often use the term "boilerplate code", but the
term really comes from the early 1900s. Boilerplate is steel that is
used in steam boilers. It is text that is "strong as steel".
In the 1890s, boilerplate was actually cast or stamped in metal ready
for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United
States. Until the 1950s, thousands of newspapers received and used this
kind of boilerplate from the nation's largest supplier, the Western
Newspaper Union. Some companies also sent out press releases as
boilerplate so that they had to be printed as written.
(Paraphrased from
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci211686,00.html)
Hi,
I have a question. Short version: do we want a hr (a horizontal rule; a
"----") following a disambiguation sentence at the beginning of an
article, such as "This article is about XYZ; for other meanings, see
articletitle (disambiguation)"?
I always thought those hrs were really ugly and disrupt the overall
structure of the page, because they separate the article title from the
article body in a much more pronounced way than in articles that don't
have this paragraph.
I also always thought that it was commonly agreed to use this format:
:''This article is about XYZ; for other meanings, see articletitle
(disambiguation)''
i.e. to use indentation and no hr.
Hephaestos cast doubt on my thoughts because he reverted my change
(http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Angel&action=history),
referring in his edit summary to [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation]] where,
however, I could not find any information about this.
What does everyone else think about this?
Thanks,
Timwi
I think the way forward from here is to emulate the systems used in
scientific peer review and publishing. What makes Wikipedia work, in
my opinion, is that is already emulates the model by which scientific
knowledge has been able to accumulate: an "information commons" to
which anyone can contribute and which anyone can use.
Until the 19th century, the scientific system was truly open to
anyone, and credentials didn't matter much. As the quality and
quantity of scientific information increased and its power to
transform technology and society became evident, the stakes got
higher and peer review entered the system as a way of trying to
determine which scientific projects should be funded and considered
reliable.
Right now Wikipedia is a hobby for most of the people who use it,
which places it in a position analogous to the days when science was
the hobby of gentleman tinkerers. I don't think many people right now
are particularly using Wikipedia as part of their job or in any other
context where they absolutely need to rely on its accuracy. When I
personally look things up on Wikipedia, for example, I don't have to
rely on its accuracy because there are other information sources that
I can use to double-check anything I find here. If its reliability
becomes more important to users, people will begin to develop more
deliberate procedures for fact-checking and credentialing.
One way that Wikipedia could incorporate peer review would be to
develop its own panels of accredited experts on various topics. Right
now users are a largely undifferentiated mass. There are some
differences between anonymous IP users, registered users and sysops,
but those differences merely reflect different permission settings in
the software and don't correspond to any distinctions in terms of
individuals' actual expertise in specific fields.
In the future, we may want to have some volunteer committees: a
science committee, a history committee, a humanities committee and so
forth. These could be further differentiated over time as need be.
For example, there could be science subcommittees in areas such as
biochemistry or particle physics. Individuals with credentials and
expertise in each field could be invited to serve. Suppose, for
example, the science committee consisted of several Nobel laureates
and other leading scientists. If a dispute arose over a particular
article, the committee would be invited to mediate and render an
opinion, and if mediation alone was insufficient to resolve the
dispute, the committee could even be given authority to impose a
binding decision.
All of these changes would consist of social self-organization of
Wikipedia users. They wouldn't entail or require modifications of the
software.
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
| Weapons of Mass Deception
--------------------------------