As an ‘add-two-sugars-and-stir’ approach, Wikipedia is an OK starting point for further research, nothing more; but its single biggest failing is that anyone who wants to can edit it - whilst you’re reading it - and these ‘editors’ are of invariably unknown, and therefore questionable, provenance and indeterminate expertise.
Finally, I was researching the [then] Director General of ASIO a few years ago, only to be regaled - by Wiki - that he was, indeed, a “raging queen, who preferred ‘cottaging’ to doing any actual work - and that’s when he wasn’t at the ballet…” The post got re-edited a full 48 hours later (by persons unknown) to reflect the news that the DG was, in fact, a happily married man with children, albeit it one with no great passion for ballet.
Whilst it’s not as bad as those poltroons who cite Creationism as actual “science”, it’s not my first port of call when needing peer-reviewed information with its concomitant sound provenance and veracity.
This can’t be over-emphasized, especially the bolded part. All the wikipedia apologizers seem to forget this part when they claim that mistakes are often caught and corrected. That doesn’t help the reader that read before the correction.
I tried to crush a cockroach with Wikipedia and my laptop broke. Encylopedia Brittanica is much more reliable for that purpose. Even World Book does a better job there.
Do you mean to tell me that the head of the Australian National Security Intelligence Service is not a raging queen who likes cottaging and ballet? :eek: Have you colonials retained none of the cherished traditions of the mother country?!!
If you see any dubious information, it’s rather simple to check the history of the site and revert it to the previous version. It’s rather depressing you waited 48 hours for someone else to do it in order to complain about it when you could have reverted the vandalism yourself.
Well, in order to notice them you would have to not be a victim of the popular misconception yourself, and, of course, many or even most people are victims of popular misconceptions. That is what “popular” means.
[quote]
Yes, I realize this of course.
Not true at all. Also, references to literature by subject experts that refute a popular misconception carry more weight than references to a hundred mentions of said misconception by non-experts.
Sounds like an annoying experience, but the people who were “edit warring” with were not acting according to Wikipedia guidelines, and there is more you could have done to ensure your improvements were recognized, had you known about it. Apart from anything else, you could have reverted back to your improved version of the article in a few clicks, without re-writing it
But this means nothing except that plagiarists are (pretty much by definition) lazy and that Wikipedia is a popular site. Also 82% of essay plagiarists who are caught used Wikipedia, and they were probably caught because Wikipedia is the first place any sensible person would compare an essay to when looking for plagiarism.
You seem to be under the misconception that someone with more authority than you is making decisions that override yours. There is no such person; there are simply people who come by after you and make changes, just as you did. Their decisions bear no more weight than your own.
Powers &8^]
Not on Wikipedia it doesn’t. All that is required is that the claim be verifiable. No status is given to the credentials of the source.
The best you can hope for is that some expert has specifically addressed the misconception, then someone can add a rider of “This claim has been dismissed by experts”. But if an expert hasn’t specifically addressed it, all you can do is add the correct information as well as a competing version… and someone will delete it within a couple of days.
I speak from experience. I had a prolonged battle years ago to try to correct the popular the misconception that forests produce oxygen from a Wikipedia article. I has 6 months of constantly battling against “everyone” as in “everyone knows forests produce oxygen”. And every idiot “citing” Greenpeace or similar organisations repeating the misconception. No matter how many references I provided to top quality expert sources including senate inquiries, “Nature”, University textbooks and so forth stating explicitly that forests do not produce oxygen, the crap came back.
When I checked back years later the article still said that forests produce oxygen.
Editing Wikipedia is like fucking a porcupine: one prick working against thousands.
It’s precisely because the controls are so loose that, in the end, the more persistent person wins regardless of who is actually right. How many times do you expect astorian to revert to his version before he says, “Ah, the hell with it”?
There’s a system of arbitrage that can be utilised in the discussion page. The actual article need not be warred over, just put a boilerplate warning at the top of an article or a citation needed point near a claim. Those familiar with wikipedia will head to the discussion page to see what the dispute is about.
The quote you attribute to me is not from me but from Bozuit’s reply to me. I guess your tags got confused somehow. My view is much the same as yours (and I have had a similar experience).
Mind you, although I am sure you know a lot more about these matters than I do, I am rather surprised to hear that forests don’t produce oxygen. They are certainly doing a lot of photosynthesis, and we are always hearing about how they sequester carbon dioxide, which should, surely, be balanced by oxygen production. If forests are not producing net oxygen, where is all the oxygen produced by their photosynthesizng going? (And come to that, where is all the oxygen we do have coming from? Grasslands? Algae?)
Maybe so, but most people don’t know this, or do not know how to utilize it. This is just another factor that tilts the balance of power towards those who are not subject experts but who spend a lot of time editing Wikipedia and learning its ins and outs.
I have tried with leaving a note on the relevant discussion page when I have noticed an error, but do not want to put in the (sometimes quite considerable) time it takes to edit the actual entry, and find and correctly format the relevant citations. I doubt if that does much good, though (although at least notes on the discussion page are unlikely to simply be disappeared).
Anyway, I believe essentially it is that, firstly, plants respire like animals do (they take in oxygen and excrete carbon dioxide) as well as photosynthesizing. Also, you ask where the oxygen they produce goes. You could ask the same question about where the carbon from the carbon dioxide goes, if they are net consumers of that. I believe it can be used in growing or stored as carbohydrates but of course a rainforest that stays the same size cannot be growing constantly at the same time. Things must be dying too. So I suppose it’s a combination of respiration (plants using the carbon they stored in photosynthesis) and decay. Not certain though, awaiting a better answer.
Tell Blake, not me. I got the effect I wanted (and the unclosed quote tag in my post was a quotation from his).
Typical Wikipedian! You clearly know less about this than I do. Normally growing plants most certainly do not use up as much oxygen in respiration as they release in photosynthesis (if they did, they would not be able to grow). I was hoping for an answer from Blake, who probably actually knows. (And I did not ask about where the carbon goes.)
You obviously didn’t read what I wrote properly. You might want to try doing that before writing a rude reply next time.
First of all, I know you did not ask about where the carbon goes and that is clear from what I wrote. To paraphrase, I said “if you ask ‘where does the oxygen plants produce go if a forest isn’t a net producer of oxygen’ you might as well ask ‘where does the carbon plants take from carbon dioxide go if a forest is a net producer of oxygen’”.
Secondly, I am also aware that growing plants do use more carbon dioxide than oxygen (and I addressed this above too) but unless a rainforest is expanding in size, there is as much death/decay going on as there is growing. If the plant biomass stays the same it can’t take more carbon out of the atmosphere than it releases which means it’s also not releasing more oxygen than it uses.
I don’t think an editor without a proxy would survive for very long adding uncited material without bothering to check discussion pages, especially if they ignore the comments left on their own IP/user page.
But there was no punishment for not acting according to the guidelines. So what was their incentive to stop?
In case it’s not clear, that’s what I did after the first couple of times.
Look, I’m going to appeal from authority here - on the subject I was editing, I am an authority. I’ve written at least 10 books on the subject, authored or co-authored about 300 or more technical papers, and traveled to 4 continents and I don’t know how many countries to lecture on this subject. People pay me an awful lot to do this because it’s been my area of specialty for more than 2 decades and I kick ass at it. And I simply do not have the time to keep logging in every 8 hours to check and revert all the changes from some pissant little piece of shit troll who is fucking around with me by undoing my edit, while taunting me over it. I did try contacting the Wiki administration at the time and received thundering silence.
Wikipedia’s very structure is set up to allow trolls to prosper until they finally get tired of playing with you. Every single week I find an article which is vandalized, sometimes very badly, and I know if I spend time trying to fix it (and unless you know the article well, you might inadvertently revert something you shouldn’t have) the troll is likely to come back and just vandalize it again.
When Wiki works, it works well. I actually do like Wikipedia much better than Cecil does (or at least I believe I do after chatting with him about it on numerous occasions…) But it has far too much authority attached to it.
Wikipedia is probably most useful as a starting point for people who are already well educated enough to sniff bullshit. It seems like a pretty dangerous “tool” for, say, an earnest 14 year old who may look at a page once and never realize that that was the day the page was full of nonsense, or have the discrimination to see that the page is obviously maintained by, perhaps, the person who is the subject of the page.
And it’s surprising–I just looked at the page about James Schlesinger, the former secretary of defense etc. It’s clearly kept up by him or by his office. I mean, he is a vain and prickly man, but…Jim Schlesinger? Point being, anyone looking for information about, say, his tenure in the Ford Administration, without already knowing something about him, is going to be misled.
I choose Schlesinger because, perhaps, he doesn’t have the same emotional valence as forests and global climate concerns, but the same point applies more broadly.
That’s not true. The vast, vast, vast majority of vandalism cases are simple drive-by one-time deals and easily (and usually quickly) reverted.
Ongoing, persistent, non-obvious vandalism is, of course, a tougher nut to crack, but it is, fortunately, far less prevalent than anecdotal evidence reveals.
Powers &8^]
