As in everything else, Feynman was prescient when he talked of "Cargo Cults": http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html "In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to [simulate] headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land." This is also a description of Wikipedia after the inmates have taken over the asylum. No planes land; no new articles are created or _can_ be created. Those HTML headphones look right, but no sound comes out. Wikipedia has itself become a "cargo cult"! All organizations go through transitions similar to those that people themselves go through, but at different rates. People go through infancy, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age, old age, death. Adolescent organizations are very brash but vibrant; their exuberance carries them through a number of mistakes that would cost older organizations their lives. Early adult organizations are very competent, and have usually learned from the excesses of their youthful indiscretions. Middle and older age organizations start becoming extremely conservative -- even reactionary, and are unwilling to take the kinds of risks that they must in order to survive the significant changes occurring about them. Finally, having no new blood, and no new ideas in years/decades, the organization succumbs to the next significant change without even putting up a fight. The amazing thing about the age of the internet is how quickly organizations have been aging. The kinds of risk-averse behavior that traditionally took 20-30 years to develop are now overtaking organizations less than 10 years old. The only good news is the speed of development of new organizations to pick up the mantle from the older organizations that decide to stop changing & innovating. At 07:31 PM 6/3/2012, Thane Plambeck wrote:
Awhile ago I noticed that someone created this page on the Wikipedia that refers both to a paper I wrote, and a web site I maintain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indistinguishability_quotient
However, the page is almost nonsensical and I've been tempted more than once to rewrite it from scratch.
But I doubt I'll ever do it, because I couldn't bear to see someone officiously revert my extensive corrections to the original (lame) version that is there now. And I assume that it would raise the suspicions of editors, since I'm the only person whose work is referred to on the page.
Has anyone else had an experience like this? I've contributed little to Wikipedia except the current photo of JHC, Elwyn Berlekamp, Vi Hart, and Richard Guy. I'd happily rewrite it if I knew it wouldn't be wiped out.
On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 6:45 PM, Charles Greathouse <charles.greathouse@case.edu> wrote:
But I still think there is a place in the world for a WikiProofia, where math results (new or old) can be submitted together with a proof that eventually could be mechanically checked.
Perhaps metamath.org? Of course that's mechanically checked, not just potentially mechanically checked.
Charles Greathouse Analyst/Programmer Case Western Reserve University
On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 1:10 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Thanks, Robert, for your excellent & helpful suggestions.
But I still think there is a place in the world for a WikiProofia, where math results (new or old) can be submitted together with a proof that eventually could be mechanically checked. In the mean time, a human-readable proof would suffice, because math readers who didn't buy the proof given could request additional details.
I would also love for there to be an online version of "Proofs without Words", or "Picture Proofs". (Yes, I know, Bourbaki will be spinning in its/his/her/their grave(s).)
I had thought that Wikipedia might be the germ of such a resource, but its current rules make that impossible.
Since it doesn't appear that those rules will be changing any time soon, it's probably time to start anew.
At 09:54 PM 6/2/2012, Robert Munafo wrote:
Unfortunately, the only effective way to contribute on Wikipedia is to publish it elsewhere and wait for lots of people who happen to also read Wikipedia to think that your stuff is important. Sometimes "wait" means "more than 5 years".
It also helps to think of Wikipedia people as being kind of a niche audience. The real audience is people who use search engines like Google and Bing.
I also think that if you link from your article to other related articles online, the process is quicker. Link to other related content, such as the external links presently used by that Wikipedia article, or be more creative and do your own Google/Bing searches to find other useful articles on circumscription (sic?)
That means turning your .txt into a .html (hint: you can put "<pre>" around most of it) and submit its URL to Google and Bing (see [1] and [2]). You should do that to all of your publshed content, at the very least adding title and keywords tags, which will get your work noticed much more effectively than being linked on Wikipedia.
- Robert
[1] http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/website-owner/
[2] https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
On 6/2/12, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Does anyone know how to deal with Wikipedia?
I tried this morning to make a very modest edit to the Circumscribed_circle article, and someone else keeps reverting it back. [...]
http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/FAQ-circumcircle.txt
[...]
-- Robert Munafo -- mrob.com Follow me at: gplus.to/mrob - fb.com/mrob27 - twitter.com/mrob_27 - mrob27.wordpress.com - youtube.com/user/mrob143 - rilybot.blogspot.com
-- Thane Plambeck tplambeck@gmail.com http://counterwave.com/