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[Jaqie Fox]

HUH?

Nice way to change the subject and force me to 'defend' myself. Fine, I'll bite.  You are trying to say I am trying to 'prove' my knowledge. To whom? people I have never met and probably never will? I'm sorry, but if you think I'm that shallow you are severely mistaken.  I like HELPING people, and more then that I like helping people to help themselves, a la "teach someone to fish".  I try to force people to think about ways to learn and research questions they have on their own, which is incredibly lacking in society today. We live in the information age, what use is all those exabytes of information if nobody bothers even looking stuff up?

Or maybe I am just really wierd, and it never even occurs to anyone that there are still people out there that actively try to help others, that like doing it.

[JT]

Well, what I was saying is that Wikipedia is only occasionally reliable.  It's pioneered by the web community at large and is rife with unchecked facts all on its own.  And as I mentioned, it's rarely "clear"... ;-)

The other point is that Wikipedia only talks about the most common misconceptions... it omits other misconceptions.

I do apologise for putting you into a position like that.  That wasn't exactly big of me.  I just felt kind of like you were being callously dismissive... sorry.  (Aside from the routine puppy slaughterings, I'm actually a pretty nice person!)

[Slartibartfast]

quote:Originally posted by Jaqie Fox:
<STRONG>And it never even occurs to anyone that there are still people out there that actively try to help others, that like doing it.</STRONG>

There are?!  

[Jaqie Fox]

Point 1: Wikipedia is the best central resource for information short of google, but you seem to misunderstand how it is designed.  It is designed so the information is referenced, and it is heavily encouraged by wikipedia editors (wikipedians) to check the references whenever anyone looks at an article. If they have none or very few, then it is deemed no more reliable then gossip.

Point 2: If you don't like the content of a wikipedia article (a la incomplete information) then become a wikipedian and add the information in.  I have.

If you think I am being callously dismissive, then you are seeing a few very distinct portions of my personality: 1) I don't put up with bull#%&^ from anyone, that includes false information (be it intended or mistaken). I am extremely blunt, to the point, concise, and as some put it "abrasive"... I believe life is too short to deal with political correctness, social fluff, and the like.  As I put on my website, "True knowledge knows no bounds."

If you haven't figured it out yet, I am *DEFINITELY* not a people person, I am an engineer, a knowledge person.  The type that is a sponge for knowledge.  That is both my greatest strength and my greatest weakness.

[Bas Cost Budde]

Personally:

People are forbiddingly difficult to handle. They seldom have manuals, and if they have most of the stuff is outdated, or vague, or incorrect, or contradictory, or all of this. They do not have cleanly designed interfaces. They expose but a limited set of reliable behavior.

In short, they're all different.

I sometimes wonder whether I'm really autistic. I find that I can hardly be, because I have a great sense of humor (not just of my own jokes), I can play with language extensively, and I can imagine the world from another's perspective. But I have those days...

I find little point in looking for weaknesses in others anymore. I used to seek that when I was 18 or so. (I doubled that three years ago.) I do make a strong effort to find the points of support someone can offer, and try to bring more of these together so some sort of community can work. What sort of job should I have?

[Jaqie Fox]

Interesting you should mention high functioning autism, because I have it.

[puke]

a topic on which the wikipedia has a high quantity of unreferenced material on.  

i know this isnt the topic of the thread, and the dude that was picking a fight with you was both out of line and just flat wrong, but he was right on one point.

the wikipedia really is a cesspool of misinformation, rumor, and popular misconception.  its probably as inacurate as any other source of information, from printed encyclopedias to network news, but its inacurate in different ways.  

as it becomes more and more robust and its use increases, its inacuracies will continue to be defined by dominant cultural views.  and as a source of information, it will begin to reinforce those views until it becomes (more than it already is) a part of the slow tide of cultural consiusness.

sure, it has its supporters.  sure many of them are dedicated and sharp.  but you must acknowledge that many others are not, many of them are just flat wrong and post misinformation and, with the absence of experts to review each section, there is no real way to verify the information.

again, i dont mean to say its worse than any other source of information.  but anyone who relies on a SINGLE source of misinformation is basically bending over to receive the authors agenda.

sadly, a large number of references and off-site links does not directly equate to veracity.  its depressingly easy to find a large ammount of reference material to support any view point.

and its just the way of things that multiple view points can emerge from examining the same material.

so i guess the moral of this imbicilic meandering post is to trust no one, burn books, destroy all sources of information, and in the end we will have a perfect world where only the strong survive.

i mean, the moral is to think for your self, and be carefull of what you feed your brain.  especially on the internet, because who knows where its been.

edit: fixed a particularly agrevious spelling error.  you can suffer through the rest of my tripe, unedited.

[ April 01, 2007: Message edited by: puke ]

[Jaqie Fox]

What you said has its' merits. However, the very nature of wikipedia shows that peer-reviewed materials will eventually come in line with factual data, given enough time.  A couple of examples (that are on my watch in wikipedia) are the supercomputers article and the WRT54G article.  Both have slowly come in-line with facts due to the pure number of people editing enough with verifiable information end up 'winning' any 'fight' over content.  Read the 'talk/discussion' page on those two articles and you will see that very plainly.  One of the big precepts of wikipedia is NPOV (neutral point of view).  Eventually most things in wikipedia become pure NPOV or at least very close to it once they get enough attention.

This brings me to my next point: no information is infallable. You are also likely to find misinformation and such in a hardcopy encyclopedia, website, or anywhere else humans have the data input in their control (which is everywhere on Earth last I checked).  The whole point of wikipedia is to get people interested in finding out things and reading, reading, reading.  I find many times I go to an article on wikipedia I end up reading up on a subject I never intended to, following a train of research to verify things I read in the original article I saw.

[puke]

it sounds like we mostly agree with each other, but what i think is interesting is how we define that neutral point of view.

as long as there are a large number of competing viewpoints participating in a discussion, the discussion as a whole will necessarily trend toward that neutral point of veiw.

the interesting thing is what point of view takes shape from that, and what it implies about our culture as a whole.  also, we must observe that a neutral bias is not the same as unbiased.  and it certainly is not the same as factual.

i dont mean to suggest that reliable factual information is readily available from any source, or even that non-factual things are witout merrit.  just that its wise to take them for what they are, and use them with caution.

[JT]

Just to pop back in and say "no hard feelings", and to say that I do peruse Wikipedia, pretty much all the time.  The difference is, I take everything I read there with a grain of salt... so if I look up a "boot virus" on Wikipedia, for instance, I'm acutely aware of the fact that all I'm seeing is only a few people's take on what exactly a boot virus is, and also know that more often than not, there is considerably more information out there than on Wikipedia, but in 99% of cases it's locked away behind some $30-per-article technical journal.  No thank you.  I check my facts if I'm under the impression I don't know anything about the subject.  Sometimes I can be wrong, and I'm well aware that I don't check my facts often enough, but for the most part I'm usually right... and certainly far more correct than the mainstream population is on most issues.  I had to correct my stepmom the other day when she said that trans fats were completely banned in Europe, for instance. =)

Wikipedia is essentially an "entry-level guide" to any subject...  The same is true of any encyclopedia, of course, but Wikipedia is particularly bad for it, because only half of it is by intention -- the rest is because of its model.