Tag: wikipedia

Against holistic “medicine”

woo like this needs to be stamped out. this simultaneously raises my opinion of mr. wales and further lowers it of change.org (though it was already pretty terrible). Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia responds to ridiculous petition seeking to force Wikipedia to take pseudoscience at face value.

No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful.

Wikipedia’s policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals – that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.

Med School Wikipedia

This seems like a good idea. Most papers will never be read by anyone, so this is a nice way to create less throwaway work in academia.

Medical students at the University of California, San Francisco, will be able to get course credit for editing Wikipedia articles about diseases, part of an effort to improve the quality of medical articles in the online encyclopedia and help distribute the articles globally via cell phones. While professors often incorporate Wikipedia work into classes, hoping that student research can live on online, this is the first time a medical school will give credit for such work.

Controversy on Wikipedia

who knew that List of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. employees is the fourth most controversial topic on wikipedia?

Ultimately by visualizing the controversy in Wikipedia, we’re able to see both topics that appear to have cross-linguistic resonance (e.g. Arab-Israeli conflict), and those of more narrow interest such as the Islas Malvinas/Falkland islands article in the Spanish Wikipedia. The data presented here therefore offers a window into not just the topics and places that different language communities are interested in, but also the topics that seem worth fighting about.

Wikipedia Feedback Loop

It’s hard to imagine that Wikipedia articles are actually the very best source of information for all of the many 1000s of topics on which they now appear as the top Google search result. What’s much more likely is that the Web, through its links, and Google, through its search algorithms, have inadvertently set into motion a very strong feedback loop that amplifies popularity and, in the end, leads us all, lemminglike, down the same well-trod path – the path of least resistance. You might call this the triumph of the wisdom of the crowd. I would suggest that it would be more accurately described as the triumph of the wisdom of the mob. The former sounds benign; the latter, less so.

wikipedia’s information architecture plus positive feedback loop mean that is is ever more the #1 result for common terms.

Area Man edits Wikipedia

Area Man Honored To Be One Who Added Death Date To Heath Ledger's Wikipedia Page. he noted that this recent triumph brought with it a greater level of fame than any of his previous Wikipedia updates, which include the number of attendees at a 2006 Dave Matthews concert and the name of Bruce Willis’s dog.

Wikihistory

International Association of Time Travelers: Members’ Forum Subforum: Europe – Twentieth Century – Second World War At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote: Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

time travelers hanging out on the talk page.