http://atomicprecision.wordpress.com/http://atomicprecision.wordpress.com/about_aias/
"So standard physics is a morasse of unprovable assumptions,
unobservables, and blatantly incorrect theory. By now it comes as no
surprise that wikipedia suppresses all the flaws. It is in the
interest of their “moderators” to do so, otherwise sinecures from
public funding will be in danger. These are soft jobs based on the
intellectual inertia of Governments."
- d.
I said:
> It was there on link six.
Turns out it was not to the wikihow site, just a use of their name.
I did see it on the site, one time. Maybe google does hav scruples and leaks
in those scruples, just like wikipedia.
In a message dated 8/22/2009 10:56:20 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
dgerard(a)gmail.com writes:
> Because there is no need to determine what the meaning of
> the particular term or keyword is, the pages it returns generally deal
> with the same concept or concepts that you entered. For instance, if
> you enter "Flower" and "Bee", it will find pages where these two
> concepts overlap - those are pages about pollination.>>
-------------------
This seems big to me.
It's creating, in a mindless way, semantic relationships between keywords.
This has been thought about for a long time it seems, but no one has really
solved the annoying issue of how to avoid most false positives. I don't
think you can avoid them all because English is so ambiguous but the use of
cross-links is a major leap forward.
Very few people are going to link-up concepts that are basely minor, but
scan all pages for the links highlights the semantic connetions between
concepts. You could even take it one step further, use the semantic web to "point
out" semantic connections that are not directly obvious. Such as a leap
from beekeeper to honeycomb. Try to do that using Google. You get thousands
of bad hits before you get the one good one.
Search for "Hillbillies" and "Movie", using a semantic web you get the
exact hit you want.
W.J.
> carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com writes:
>> *a département of France
>> *a French river
>> *a French city
>> *the French name for Vienna>>
Shouldn't it be [[Vienne]]? With the lede starting out"
'''Vienne''' (English spelling: Vienna), is a city...
A bit off topic, but I'd love to throw down and start an enormous
fight over endonyms versus exonyms:
How is it claimed that we are bound to English spelling only, and yet
permit all the Nordic, Germanic, and French characters* - few of which
most *English* speakers know the pronunciation of. (*?)
If we want to really go international and say i18n permits non-English
spelling (characters), why then not make endonyms the standard? The
lingua franca is not just for native speakers and readers, but for
everyone who might potentially deals at all with English sources).
-Stevertigo
In a message dated 8/22/2009 8:59:52 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
kgnpaul(a)gmail.com writes:
> Right well, I'll start brushing up on my Breton and by the time I get
> around
> to learning Vietnamese the sun will have obliterated the earth and
> Wikipedia
> as we know it.>>----------
I will wager $100 that Wikipedia will be gone long before the sun turns
into a Red Giant.
W.J.
In a message dated 8/22/2009 8:04:51 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com writes:
> Will, is this genealogy webpage reliable at all?
>
> http://gilles.maillet.free.fr/histoire/famille_bourgogne/famille_vienne.htm
> >>
----------------------------
Well one thing I always caution people is, don't rely on websites of modern
compilations *if* they don't provide sources. So let's check first the
usual suspects and we can see right off that a large portion of this seems to
be pulled in-tact from E.S. (III:452)
If you want to rely on a site that I won't R.O.S. (revert on site) I'd
recommend genealogics. We can see that Leo van de Pas (operator of genealogics)
has extracted all or most of this line, for example see Hughes de Vienne,
Sire de St George here :
http://www.genealogics.org/getperson.php?personID=I00164470&tree=LEO
You can follow this line back or forth and see what E.S. says or doesn't
about it.
That would be a good starting point. BUT (here you see my big but), always
always check what source Leo has stated, at the bottom of each entry. Some
sources like Paget are notoriously unreliable.
Will Johnson
In a message dated 8/22/2009 12:42:20 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com writes:
> *a département of France
> *a French river
> *a French city
> *the French name for Vienna>>
-----------------------------
The Council of Vienne.
Also apparently Vienne is a surname, I'm sure we can find SOME obscure
person named Vienne....
Will Johnson
In a message dated 8/22/2009 6:44:23 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
stvrtg(a)gmail.com writes:
> How is it claimed that we are bound to English spelling only, and yet
> permit all the Nordic, Germanic, and French characters* - few of which
> most *English* speakers know the pronunciation of. (*?)>>
--------------------
Diacritical marks are evil and must be destroyed.
In addition the period after initials is redundant and evil (and must be
destroyed).
The usage "Dr Smith, M.D." is silly and evil and must be destroyed.
The insistence by highbrows to spell "re-su-me" (your job history) with a
diacritical mark is excessively evil and not only must be destroyed but all
those who espouse this cause must be destroyed as well (and their families,
in-laws and pets, especially cats).
How much sugar is in this Jamba Juice I'm drinking....
W.J.
I am supposed to be taking a wiki-vacation to finish my PhD thesis and
find a job for next year. However, this afternoon I decided to take a
break and consider an interesting question recently suggested to me by
someone else:
When one downloads a dump file, what percentage of the pages are
actually in a vandalized state?
This is equivalent to asking, if one chooses a random page from
Wikipedia right now, what is the probability of receiving a vandalized
revision?
Understanding what fraction of Wikipedia is vandalized at any given
instant is obviously of both practical and public relations interest.
In addition it bears on the motivation for certain development
projects like flagged revisions. So, I decided to generate a rough
estimate.
For the purposes of making an estimate I used the main namespace of
the English Wikipedia and adopted the following operational
approximations: I considered that "vandalism" is that thing which
gets reverted, and that "reverts" are those edits tagged with "revert,
rv, undo, undid, etc." in the edit summary line. Obviously, not all
vandalism is cleanly reverted, and not all reverts are cleanly tagged.
In addition, some things flagged as reverts aren't really addressing
what we would conventionally consider to be vandalism. Such caveats
notwithstanding, I have had some reasonable success with using a
revert heuristic in the past. With the right keywords one can easily
catch the standardized comments created by admin rollback, the undo
function, the revert bots, various editing tools, and commonly used
phrases like "rv", "rvv", etc. It won't be perfect, but it is a quick
way of getting an automated estimate. I would usually expect the
answer I get in this way to be correct within an order of magnitude,
and perhaps within a factor of a few, though it is still just a crude
estimate.
I analyzed the edit history up to the mid-June dump for a sample
29,999 main namespace pages (sampling from everything in main
including redirects). This included 1,333,829 edits, from which I
identified 102,926 episodes of reverted "vandalism". As a further
approximation, I assumed that whenever a revert occurred, it applied
to the immediately preceding edit and any additional consecutive
changes by the same editor (this is how admin rollback operates, but
is not necessarily true of tools like undo).
With those assumptions, I then used the timestamps on my identified
intervals of vandalism to figure out how much time each page had spent
in a vandalized state. Over the entire history of Wikipedia, this
sample of pages was vandalized during 0.28% of its existence. Or,
more relevantly, focusing on just this year vandalism was present
0.21% of the time, which suggests that one should expect 0.21% of
mainspace pages in any recent enwiki dump will be in a vandalized
state (i.e. 1 in 480).
(Note that since redirects represent 55% of the main namespace and are
rarely vandalized, one could argue that 0.37% [1 in 270] would be a
better estimate for the portion of actual articles that are in a
vandalized condition at any given moment.)
I also took a look at the time distribution of vandalism. Not
surprisingly, it has a very long tail. The median time to revert over
the entire history is 6.7 minutes, but the mean time to revert is 18.2
hours, and my sample included one revert going back 45 months (though
examples of such very long lags also imply the page had gone years
without any edits, which would imply an obscure topic that was also
almost never visited). In the recent period these factors becomes 5.2
minutes and 14.4 hours for the median and mean respectively. The
observation that nearly 50% of reverts are occurring in 5 minutes or
less is a testament to the efficient work of recent changes reviewers
and watchlists.
Unfortunately the 5% of vandalism that persists longer than 35 hours
is responsible for 90% of the actual vandalism a visitor is likely to
encounter at random. Hence, as one might guess, it is the vandalism
that slips through and persists the longest that has the largest
practical effect.
It is also worth noting that the prevalence figures for February-May
of this year are slightly lower than at any time since 2006. There is
also a drop in the mean duration of vandalism coupled to a slight
increase in the median duration. However, these effects mostly
disappear if we limit our considerations to only vandalism events
lasting 1 month or shorter. Hence those changes may be in significant
part linked to cut-off biasing from longer-term vandalism events that
have yet to be identified. The ambiguity in the change from earlier
in the year is somewhat surprising as the AbuseFilter was launched in
March and was intended to decrease the burden of vandalism. One might
speculate that the simple vandalism amenable to the AbuseFilter was
already being addressed quickly in nearly all cases and hence its
impact on the persistence of vandalism may already have been fairly
limited.
I've posted some summary data on the wiki at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism_statistics
Given the nature of the approximations I made in doing this analysis I
suspect it is more likely that I have somewhat underestimated the
vandalism problem rather than overestimated it, but as I said in the
beginning I'd like to believe I am in the right ballpark. If that's
true, I personally think that having less than 0.5% of Wikipedia be
vandalized at any given instant is actually rather comforting. It's
not a perfect number, but it would suggest that nearly everyone still
gets to see Wikipedia as intended rather than in a vandalized state.
(Though to be fair I didn't try to figure out if the vandalism
occurred in more frequently visited parts or not.)
Unfortunately, that's it for now as I need to get back to my thesis /
job search.
-Robert Rohde
You are, I believe, thinking of Vierne.
Philippe
------Original Message------
From: Ray Saintonge
Sender: wikien-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To: English Wikipedia
ReplyTo: English Wikipedia
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Annoying hatnotes
Sent: Aug 22, 2009 4:48 PM
WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote:
> carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com writes:
>
>> *a département of France
>> *a French river
>> *a French city
>> *the French name for Vienna>>
>>
> -----------------------------
>
> The Council of Vienne.
> Also apparently Vienne is a surname, I'm sure we can find SOME obscure
> person named Vienne....
>
>
I have a vague recollection of someone with that name associated with
organ music. :-\
Ec
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