[Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals with content issues.

Sun Aug 29 17:16:58 UTC 2010

On 29/08/2010 16:46, David Gerard wrote:
> On 29 August 2010 15:38, Peter Damian<peter.damian at btinternet.com>  wrote:
>
>> The problem is that until someone sits up and notices the serious errors that
>> are propagated through Wikipedia (and which are now becoming part of the
>> folk wisdom of the internet), no one will be bothered. The problem is that no one
>> *knows* there are problems, and so no one can be bothered. I've started documenting
>> the problem in a small way, e.g. here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/william-of-ockham.html
>> and here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/avicennian-logic.html , but this is only
>> in my own area of expertise.
>> What is the very smallest thing that could be done, I wonder?
>
>
> Probably just documenting problems, as you note.
>
> It is helpful that on Wikipedia the editorial process is largely
> transparent, so the question "how did it get like this?" can actually
> be answered. Wikipedia is not reliable, but it turns out that how
> paper encyclopedias and newspapers were written was similarly
> susceptible - with Wikipedia we can see inside the sausage factory
> rather than pretending that the mass media is a happy unicorn-filled
> fairyland of scrupulous fact-checking and expert supervision.
>

I've mentioned before that this was wrong for almost 2 years, and it 
went through various edits and reformatting over that time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Non-uniform_rational_B-spline&action=historysubmit&diff=124576209&oldid=18078134

I got three of my coleagues with Phd's in maths to look at it 
independently and all three said something to the effect of "I'm going 
to pretend I've never read that because otherwise I'll have to correct 
it and I'm not prepared to spend the evening argue the toss with a 
teenager." and they weren't alone, because other geometric modelers had 
drawn my attention to it in the first place.

Now whether they would have had to or not isn't the point. The point was 
that all had experience onwiki aguements, and all had independently 
decided that they're time was better spent in ways other than agueing 
with a wikieditor.