28 Apr
2018
28 Apr
'18
2:05 p.m.
wikipedia and politics is a bad mixture. wikipedia and religion is a
bad mixture. wikipedia and ego is a bad mixture.
Imagine wikipedia articles edited and counteredited by the Newton
crowd and the Leibnitz crowd during that long dispute over who had had
priority, who had borrowed, who had stolen, who had ... (censored)
(censored) (censored) ....
Subjects where there is plentiful knowledge, even if it is obscure -
Calculus, Old English, the structure of the Unix file system, Lewis
Carroll's poem the Jabberwocky, the shape of the British constitution
and its offshoots, etc - they tend to reproduce the best known data.
On other matters, it can be decidedly iffy.
Wesley Parish
On 4/28/18, Ian Zimmerman <itz(a)very.loosely.org> wrote:
On 2018-04-27 15:15, Dave Horsfall wrote:
Wikipedia is only as accurate as the last idiot
who updated it.
One should always question authority, nonetheless in many areas
wikipedia is excellent. I get more out of slowly and carefully reading
a wikipedia maths article than I ever got out of sitting through a
university lecture. I can say the same about botany articles.
I guess that's because idiots aren't drawn to these fields in large
numbers.
--
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
To reply privately _only_ on Usenet and on broken lists
which rewrite From, fetch the TXT record for no-use.mooo.com.