[Foundation-l] Looking for stories of readers affected by Wikipedia

Thu Nov 11 09:35:15 UTC 2010

On 11/11/2010 08:50 AM, John Vandenberg wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Nikola Smolenski<smolensk at eunet.rs>  wrote:
>> On 11/11/2010 07:31 AM, Sue Gardner wrote:
>>> * Ideally, they would be stories of people who
>>> pre-exposure-to-Wikipedia would have had circumscribed access to
>>> information. Because they grew up in a small town with no library,
>>> because their school didn't stock certain kinds of books, because
>>> materials in their language are of limited availability, because their
>>> government limits access to certain types of information -- in
>>> general, because their economic/political/socio-cultural circumstances
>>> somehow impede(d) easy access to information.
>>
>> I have an anti-story, about a critically useful information that was
>> available in a home library, yet would not be allowed on Wikipedia per
>> its policies. Anyone interested?
>
> I am.

Back when we were under sanctions, it was impossible to buy antifreeze 
(or it was prohibitively expensive). So, my father remembered that in 
one of the books in our home library he once read that it it is possible 
to make antifreeze by mixing glycerine, alcohol and water in appropriate 
amount. It took him weeks to search through the home library, but he 
eventually did find the book and made his own antifreeze.

Now, I have actually found a bit of the needed information at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycerol : "The minimum freezing point 
temperature is at about -36 °F / -37.8 °C corresponding to 60-70 % 
glycerol in water.[11]". But the problem is, I would not feel 
comfortable with making my own antifreeze from a single sentence (for 
example, does it matter if you pour water in glycerine or glycerine in 
water?) but if more detailed instructions would be added to Wikipedia, 
they would be removed per WP:NOTHOWTO. The book also included a table 
with the freezing points of various ratios of glycerine, alcohol and 
water (the point was to make the cheapest mixture that would not freeze 
at the lowest temperature we could expect) and for this too I don't see 
where in Wikipedia it could be added.

> It sounds like it would be allowed on Wikisource.

It probably would be allowed on Wikibooks. But for one reason or 
another, people simply aren't interested enough in working on Wikibooks; 
Wikibooks don't show high enough in Google because the articles are not 
highly interlinked; and the Wikibooks howto in the opposite fashion 
could not have encyclopedic information in it (for example the very 
important section "Historical cases of contamination with diethylene 
glycol" that is present in the Wikipedia article and that would 
obviously be very important to someone who needs to make his own 
antifreeze).