We don’t “pass” traffic in NJ, dude. We get stuck in it.
It’s true that if I felt like whacking some gongs, I’d have numerous options within a 2-hour drive, but considering the sheer amount and variety of stuff that’s packed into this little state, it’s just very surprising that there aren’t any listed IN the state. Hell, we even have a rodeo.
Now I feel compelled to search out the gamelan top 40 on youtube…
No. Agnosticism is just a mealy-mouthed refusal to treat religion like any other area of study. If there is no evidence that Ancient Rome had gunpowder weapons we do not say we are agnostic to the idea and pretend we don’t know and can’t ever know if they did or not, we say Ancient Rome did not have gunpowder weapons, and if you want to claim otherwise you better have proof.
It’s the default because it’s the default for everything. The reason we believe in cats and not unicorns is because we possess massive amounts of evidence that cats exist and no meaningful evidence that unicorns exist. The default assumption is that neither cats nor unicorns exist, but there is sufficient contradicting evidence to realise that that default assumption is untrue of cats, while there is not sufficient contradicting evidence to decide the default assumption is untrue of unicorns.
Oy vey. Are you guys seriously going to argue about atheism here?
Can we get back to talking about sugar-coated Jews and jerks who delete everything?
Yes, yes. See, this is the issue. You are very, very sure that you are correct, and so are the atheist editors on Wikipedia. They believe there is no good evidence for the paranormal and that they are right right right. Obviously, incontrovertibly right.
And well, people disagree about that rightness.
Sorry about that.
When evidence is not neutral, Wikipedia (or any other source that wants to be respected for accuracy) should reflect that.
Too often we’ve seen major and minor media report “controversial” topics in science and medicine in a “neutral” fashion, i.e. “one side says this and the other says that” when in fact one perspective heavily or completely lacks validity.
If a “bias” towards facts ticks off paranormalists, antivaxers, chemtrail adherents etc. and they go somewhere other than Wikipedia for their dose of unreality - well, too bad.
Seriously? On this board? Show us some of this good evidence please.
Been there, done that. Over a decade ago. On this board. I don’t play that game any more. 
Again, it’s tricky. I believe that certain paranormal phenomena are real, others not. The trick is to have an epistemological framework in place that allows the viewpoint to be presented fairly. For example, I’m agnostic as to what is actually going on with alien abductions. I’m inclined to believe that actual ETs in nuts and bolts spacecraft are not visiting earth and abducting people. But the fact that so many people have the same kind of experience is an interesting phenomenon in its own right, so it should be presented fairly (I’m not saying Wikipedia doesn’t deal with this issue fairly; it’s just an example). What should not happen (and sometimes does happen on Wikipedia) is that articles are edited so that the best case for a particular phenomenon can’t be presented.
I think it’s the same percentage of people who ruin the SCA that ruin Wikipedia and ruin the SDMB and ruin TV Tropes. A bunch of overly-pedantic nitpickers who nitpick without regards to the substance of the argument and without caring that there are actually humans on the other side of the screen. You know who I’m talking to!
Also once I learned just how many people have early sleep paralysis (I do!) I no longer wonder why so many people have the “same experience” when it comes to paranormal activity. I am sure at least 75-80% of the “visions” of ghosts and ghoulies we get can be attributed right back to sleep paralysis. I myself have seen dark figures in the room, bright lights, funky drug hazes, and I don’t believe for a single second that anything has abducted me or been in my room. It was just some misfiring brain synapses.
The default, for a factual work, would be “non-factual until proved otherwise.” For example, it is better to say, “Some people believe that ghosts exist.” Rather than, “Ghosts may exist.” Yes, ghosts may exist, but the writer of a factual article, lacking any positive evidence, must take the most cautious approach to the material and provide no support for the idea, since there is none beyond belief.
(It’s also worth noting that on a Venn diagram, agnostics and atheists overlap. They are not mutually exclusive groups.)
But there was far MORE new under the sun when Wikipedia was launched than there has been now.
Wikipedia started in 2001. At the time, it contained articles on nothing. Every single topic a human being could possibly want to read about had to be created. Someone had to write the articles for Christianity, the circulatory system, the transistor, ballpoint pens, Gandhi, the planet Mercury, the god Mercury, the element Mercury, the line of cars called Mercury, and Freddie Mercury. Someone had to write up articles explaining volcanoes, Italy, cellular mitosis, continental drift, carpenter ants, and that festival they have in Spain where people throw tomatoes at each other.
For the most part all that stuff’s done. Try to find a Wikipedia article on something of genuine significance that ISN’T there, and you will find it a tough go. There is updating to be done, but what happens, is discovered, or is invented in 2016 is not going to be quite as vast as what happened between the beginning of the universe and 2015.
Green Bean’s example of flags, to use one topic, is a perfect microcosm of this phenomenon. You just aren’t going to have many new flags coming into use on an ongoing basis, and there is nothing more to be said about the existing ones. Look up the article for the flag of, say. Botswana. What else is there to say? You know when they adopted it, what it replaced, what it means, and there’s even a diagram for creating a perfect replica. The article is well sourced, with supporting evidence.
The same can be said of, well, anything else. Someday, someone will have to write the article on the 45th President of the United States, from Presidents from #1 up to #40 are pretty much done and the work on 41, 42, and 43 is fairly advanced. You can only do so much more work on that as it unfolds. The article on Ulysses S. Grant looks pretty solid to me.
If anything what Wikipedia needs isn’t more contributors, it’s different ones. Wikipedia has approximately forty eight billion entries about Star Wars. The article about Grand Admiral Thrawn, a character who appears in Star Wars novels, is almost as long as the article about Admiral David Farragut, an actual person who during the U.S. Civil War captured the largest city in the Confederacy. I think maybe we could use fewer articles about Star Wars.
It occurs to me that there may be some question-begging in this example, since those who’d dispute “There are no ghosts” might also dispute “There is no support for the existence of ghosts.”
About your more general point, I’m not sure whether you and I are in agreement or not. But I think that, on any point on which there is dispute or disagreement, with significant numbers of reasonably well-informed human beings weighing in on both/all sides of the issue, it would be misleading and intellectually dishonest for Wikipedia not to acknowledge that the issue was disputed, but rather to write as if one side of the issue were the obviously correct one that “we know” to be true.
So, when writing about God, for example, the Wikipedia writer/editor may personally be a theist or atheist or deist or pantheist or agnostic or whatever, but he/she should write “as an agnostic,” in the sense that he/she shouldn’t take any particular point of view for granted. Wikipedia isn’t supposed to tell what I know, but to tell what we know. An individual may believe, or even claim to know, that God exists or doesn’t exist, but there’s enough disagreement that I think the only thing we can say about humanity collectively is that we don’t know.
Bolding mine.
You meant “who”, not that[sup]1[/sup].
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
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2. Is nitpicking my own nitpick with nested recursive footnotes sufficiently pedantic to complete the joke?[sup]2[/sup]
Do you think that Loki, Izanagi, Xenu, and the aliens following Comet Hale–Bopp are and should be presented to be just as plausible as the Christian god, Yahweh? I would treat Yahweh just as agnostically as I would treat all of these other things. People believe in them, here’s the description that those people give, end of article. That is to say, I would stick to what can factually be said on these topics.
Emphasis mine. How does one become reasonably well-informed on the existence of god? Just because many people believe a thing is no reason to ascribe it truth value. That is a big part of how knowledge evolves. Just because a large percentage of our planet’s population believes made up nonsense about invisible personal caregivers doesn’t privilege that belief. And it is through not privileging that belief that we approach a more reality based view of life.
Pretty much. I’m not sure plausibility should even be an issue with Wikipedia. If I were looking up any of those subjects, I’d want to know Who believes in them? Are they part of some particular organized sect or belief system? Where, when, and with whom did this belief originate (if known)? Where and when do/did the people who hold these beliefs primarily live? That’s all pretty much factual information that I’d want a reference work like Wikipedia to provide.
That question might well have a good answer, but I don’t think it belongs in this thread (nor does a discussion of whether God actually exists or any other Great Debate). For the record, I had in mind people who are “reasonably well-informed” in general. If lots of people believe something but all of those people are under the age of three, for example, I don’t think I’d consider it a live option.
Agreed, but tangential to my main point, which is that it isn’t Wikipedia’s business to assign truth values to disputed questions.
I didn’t say there was nothing more to be said about national flags. There is always more to be said about flags. I said that each new piece of info is less likely to be significant, meaning significant to the average user.
It’s about diminishing returns.
For example, there is an excellent and very detailed article on the flag of India. The majority of people who look at that page probably just want to know what it looks like. Only a tiny minority probably want to know the names of the members of the ad hoc flag selection committee. The names are relevant because of all the political wrangling that went into the design and adoption of the Indian flag, but getting those names into the article was a much lower priority than getting a picture and some basic info up.
Such as Conservapedia, where it just turns into a stream of modern day Geocitiesesque nutbaggery
A friend of mine who is a writer was deleted off the Dutch wikipedia. She hadn’t written it herself, and her entry was small but accurate. She had published one well-received book at the time, writes for several big publications and has a column in a national paper. She has now published her second book, again to good reviews.
I read the discussion of her deletion. It was all “she thinks she’s all that, this’ll show her” and “she probably wrote this herself” and “she’s a nobody” - I was honestly quite shocked at the blatant sexism and generally nasty tone. It’s the easiest thing in the world to find out she is not a nobody, if you google her name you find book reviews in notable papers, there are interviews, her publisher has info on her etc. It was just intentional nastiness & power tripping. Pretty sad.
Exactly.
