Timwi wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
Wikipedia is not an experiment - the scientific method does not apply.
This is just plain wrong.
It is true that Wikipedia is not an experiment in a lot of things (incl. online democracy, anarchy, etc.), but Wikipedia *is* and has always been an experiment to create an encyclopedia using a wiki. A lot of things have changed in Wikipedia because people realised at some point that certain aspects didn't work very well (e.g. the CamcelCase convention was removed because people eventually realised that having articles titled "DemocracY" and "TelephonE" is stupid). There is no reason to believe that Wikipedia has now reached a perfect state and requires no further changes to the way it works.
Absolutely. In relation to scientific method, it is not something that you turn on and off as you go through the laboratory door. We do well to alternate bouts of empirical observation and logical reasoning in everything that we do.
Ec