Re: [math-fun] Wiki article on Circumscribed_circle
On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Does anyone know how to deal with Wikipedia?
Wiki is infested with content nazis who are intent on enforcing "the rules". Overall, it's probably a necessary affliction to prevent it from becoming just another platform for spam.
If they don't accept edits from anyone, perhaps they should stop billing it as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." On 6/2/2012 6:07 PM, Dave Dyer wrote:
On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Henry Baker<hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Does anyone know how to deal with Wikipedia? Wiki is infested with content nazis who are intent on enforcing "the rules".
Overall, it's probably a necessary affliction to prevent it from becoming just another platform for spam.
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They do accept edits that follow the rules. On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 3:28 PM, David Wilson <davidwwilson@comcast.net> wrote:
If they don't accept edits from anyone, perhaps they should stop billing it as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit."
On 6/2/2012 6:07 PM, Dave Dyer wrote:
On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Henry Baker<hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Does anyone know how to deal with Wikipedia?
Wiki is infested with content nazis who are intent on enforcing "the rules".
Overall, it's probably a necessary affliction to prevent it from becoming just another platform for spam.
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-- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com
Well, the guys/gals I ran into certainly did a pretty mean goose-step. Life's too short to deal with petty tyrants like that who apparently don't get enough Activia in their diets. Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) was recently retained by the British govt to help the Brits get rid of "pay walls" for govt-sponsored research. If Jimmy (aka "Jimbo") agrees with the sort of nonsense I ran into today, then I think there will be a pretty significant backlash by the British academic community to the Wales's Wikipedia Way (My Way or the High Way). I suspect that the Brits will then develop YAWP (Yet Another WikiPedia) for academics that will have different rules -- rules more akin to normal journal publishing rules. Based on what I saw today, Wikipedia may now be so broken that nothing can fix it, except competition from another organization with different rules. At 03:07 PM 6/2/2012, you wrote:
On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Does anyone know how to deal with Wikipedia?
Wiki is infested with content nazis who are intent on enforcing "the rules".
Overall, it's probably a necessary affliction to prevent it from becoming just another platform for spam.
I disagree as a Brit, since Wiki and any such open system really, really doesn't care *who* discovered the information, it only cares that the information is correct. Although not an "academic" myself, as a Brit that's how I think *all* such research should be i,e. just give the correct info for all to see, who discovered it originally and who posted it are comparatively unimportant (except to boost the ego/s of the person/s concerned). On 3 Jun 2012, at 05:52, Henry Baker wrote:
Well, the guys/gals I ran into certainly did a pretty mean goose-step.
Life's too short to deal with petty tyrants like that who apparently don't get enough Activia in their diets.
Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) was recently retained by the British govt to help the Brits get rid of "pay walls" for govt-sponsored research.
If Jimmy (aka "Jimbo") agrees with the sort of nonsense I ran into today, then I think there will be a pretty significant backlash by the British academic community to the Wales's Wikipedia Way (My Way or the High Way).
I suspect that the Brits will then develop YAWP (Yet Another WikiPedia) for academics that will have different rules -- rules more akin to normal journal publishing rules.
Based on what I saw today, Wikipedia may now be so broken that nothing can fix it, except competition from another organization with different rules.
At 03:07 PM 6/2/2012, you wrote:
On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Does anyone know how to deal with Wikipedia?
Wiki is infested with content nazis who are intent on enforcing "the rules".
Overall, it's probably a necessary affliction to prevent it from becoming just another platform for spam.
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
The meaning and purpose of life is to give life purpose and meaning. The instigation of violence indicates a lack of spirituality.
The reason I haven't bothered to publish this particular "result" is that I considered it to fall below my standard for "least publishable unit": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit IMHO, my "result" falls into the category of "fun fact", which might have been included in HAKMEM, Programming Pearls, or Graphics Gems, but not in a separate paper. If you look at the math literature from the 19th century, these journals were happy to include tiny tidbits like this one. But that was before "publish or perish". Now, you find completely obscure papers with about 3 pages of intro; it might take you 3 months just to understand the vocabulary. Then, after all this work, you find that the "meat" is non-existent. The current size of "least publishable unit" is approaching Planck length. I just went through an exercise in trying to find priority on some minor element of "quadtrees", and was irritated by the volume of papers that all said the same thing, even while referencing one another, and while saying nothing new. I merely wanted to make this minorly interesting tidbit available to someone researching circumcircles & circumcenters, and thought that adding a single external link to my article was the best way to do this. I didn't want to distort the article itself, which was pretty good in laying out the classical info on circumcircles. But if someone were curious, they might have found my little tidbit fun. I guess Knuth or some other text might have made proving it an exercise for the reader. The size of the effort in publishing should be related to the importance of the result. Requiring full peer-reviewed publication for such "fun facts" is a waste of everyone's time. Just check the math, and if it is correct, allow it. This wasn't the Four Color Conjecture, or Fermat's Last Theorem. At 04:32 AM 6/3/2012, David Makin wrote:
I disagree as a Brit, since Wiki and any such open system really, really doesn't care *who* discovered the information, it only cares that the information is correct. Although not an "academic" myself, as a Brit that's how I think *all* such research should be i,e. just give the correct info for all to see, who discovered it originally and who posted it are comparatively unimportant (except to boost the ego/s of the person/s concerned).
You see, this is exactly where No Original Research falls flat on its face. The required competency for checking Henry's math would pass as "doing research" to most Wikipedian authorities. My own experience editing Wikipedia is similar to Henry's. After trying, unsuccessfully, to remove some clearly bogus pseudo-science (clearly bogus by several standard textbooks) from a physics article, I cited anotherWikipediaarticle that (clearly and obviously to me) disagreed with the first. I was told, by a "senior editor", that there was no way that they could enforce that articles be consistent with each other. On June 3, 2012 at 10:59 AM Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Just check the math, and if it is correct, allow it.
participants (6)
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Dave Dyer -
David Makin -
David Wilson -
Henry Baker -
J J -
Mike Stay