Re: [math-fun] Wiki article on Circumscribed_circle
From: Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com>
Let me get this straight: Wikipedia is the one place in the world where plagiarism is not only ok, but required!
Like other encyclopedias, it's a place for review articles about other people's work. I suppose if you quote someone directly you're supposed to use quotation marks.
I try not to waste my time & my readers' time by repeating stuff other people have already said much better than I could.
You might preface this, "As a content creator,..." To use a term of the derivative metapeople. It seems to me an encyclopedia is mainly for people who don't know the literature on the subject they want to read about.
Perhaps Wikipedia isn't the place for me?
Not for when you want to contribute original work. Wikipedia is for people taking the role of encyclopedia review article writers.
From: Dave Dyer <ddyer@real-me.net>
One of the things "the rules" try hardest to prevent is anything that could be construed as self promotion. Unfortunately that rules out a lot of useful content along with the meaningless drivel that is it's target.
Yes. Looking at this tradeoff two ways, 1) Wikipedia doesn't aim to be a repository of useful content, it aims to be an encyclopedia. 2) by using a rule like this, they definitely filter out a *quantity* of useful information but probably improve the ratio of useful to useless. Another cost of a rule is the work required to make the call, counting hours spent by anyone disputing it. If the filtering weren't simple, filtering wouldn't get done. Also, if it weren't simple, readers wouldn't have a reliable way to know what to expect about the quality. Impartiality per se isn't what I want as a reader, but simply-enforced "impartiality" is a lot easier for me to base my expectations on. It's more informative *about* the quality. If Wikipedia were interesting to a lot fewer readers, then it would also be interesting to a lot fewer writers, and the quantity would *also* go down, regardless of the rules. Interesting having the flip of the conversation about whether Wikipedia must suck because they let anyone come and write whatever they want. --Steve
I think that math is different from some of the other encyclopedia issues. Math has a more objective standard: the ability to prove a result as part of the article. Even in physics, the best you can do is to (in effect) list a bunch of numbers from an experiment & hope that people believe you. IMHO, there's 3 issues in math writing: 1. Is it correct? If not, resubmit when your proof is more convincing. 2. Is it important? Very, very difficult to say in math; e.g., novel proofs of old theorems are often very interesting. It probably isn't important if it shows old proofs of old theorems, unless the original theorem & proof are so inscrutable (see #3) that most people won't be able to understand the first version without a better exposition. 3. Is it well-written? Somewhat difficult in math. The first version of some important proofs may be quite a mess, but if the proof is correct, and the theorem is important, people will deal with it. (This is also true in the arts; take a look at Beethoven's manuscripts -- not everyone wrote music like Mozart, which were perfect the first time.) If you try to push someone to revise his/her paper, you may be slowing down progress, because some of these people have more important things to do & they may not have good graduate students to help them do a better version. At 11:48 AM 6/3/2012, Steve Witham wrote:
If Wikipedia were interesting to a lot fewer readers, then it would also be interesting to a lot fewer writers, and the quantity would *also* go down, regardless of the rules.
Interesting having the flip of the conversation about whether Wikipedia must suck because they let anyone come and write whatever they want.
participants (2)
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Henry Baker -
Steve Witham