Great minds discuss ideas. Mediocre minds discuss events. Small minds discuss other people. --Eleanor Roosevelt Mathematics: Can't get enough original research or validation or exceptions, and please state your assumptions. If you can explain loops and equations in English, then you might serve on [wikisophia] indefinitely. You might serve a longer and definite term if you can animate math. Physics: No perpetual motion machines, please. Original research in nuclear science is covered by treaties and your local American army base. Biology: Please restrict your original research to photographs. Chemistry: This department actually has a policy regarding notability and what you can say about compounds that are not synthesized. Biochemistry: No man's land. There's big pharma, there's governmental collusion, cover-ups, smear campaigns, drug promotions and oodles of tobacco funding. Wanna meet spooks and royalty? Then make a name for yourself in this field. Arts: um...anything goes...sorta...not on wikipedia, though...just sorta writing about arts, like policy making and other methods of screwing you, is there. Try to make it artful, anyway, just so nobody forgets. If I bored you to tears, then I am sorry. Forget that I told you to ignore all rules until you really need to do that. Biographies of Living People: This is a rat's nest of politics and corruption, starting with who writes the rules, who is a credible authority, and it does not end with those who enforce the rules. It is not safe to talk about dead people on wikipedia. No induction, really, especially if it is bad news. History: News is the first rough draft of history. Your news and my news are different things, and they are both anthropocentric if not wrong. Try to understand that before you make wikipedia into a discussion forum.
Handy Guide to Modern Science: 1. If it is green or it wiggles, then it is Biology. 2. If it stinks, then it is Chemistry. 3. If it does not work, then it is Physics. --"MURPHY.EXE 123"
BrewJay's Babble Bin
Bohgosity BumaskiL brewhaha@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca wrote:
Great minds discuss ideas. Mediocre minds discuss events. Small minds discuss other people. --Eleanor Roosevelt
...Which pretty much sums up the problem with Wikipedia: If we can't discuss things at the idea level, we're relegating ourselves to the mediocre and the small.
It's a great point - some of the best encyclopedia articles were written not by "experts" - but by people who understood that the import of writing for 'some prestigious encyclopedia' put severe limitations on the BS permitted in their work - hence forcing them to be highly conceptual.
But you have to keep in mind the basic fact that - even though there may be about 72 ways by which Wikipedia violates the traditional encyclopedia concept - Wikipedia is still an "encyclopedia." Wiki might make editing faster, but it also makes the publication of BS faster, and that's the real issue that makes wiki something not typically suitable as a research publication medium, or even a research discussion forum.
And anyway Wikipedia is still just a pastiche at best - a place where there is no impetus to put forth one's absolute "best work." "Best work" in most contexts involves "creativity" and "eloquence," and these are the very same aspects of intelligence that NOR was created to destroy (on Wikipedia).
We might hope though that we could find a way to use Objectivity (NPOV) to deal with just about anything, but that's not likely without rating mechanisms. In any case Wikipedia's greatest export might not even its articles, but rather its objective appoach to treating any subject.
Of course we should not credit Rand too much for fathering the development of all objectivity. That would be a skymining fallacy. ;-)
-Stevertigo