|
Still, any crank could write for Wikipedia. So I don't see what use Wikipedia is as a reference. There are many authoritative-sounding websites that say the Holocaust never happened, or the moon landing was staged in a movie studio, or even that the Masons really control the government. |
|
Still, any crank could write for Wikipedia. So I don't see what use Wikipedia is as a reference. There are many authoritative-sounding websites that say the Holocaust never happened, or the moon landing was staged in a movie studio, or even that the Masons really control the government. |
|
:If oppobrium isn't enough to stop people--and in the first nine months of Wikipedia's existence, that has been enough--we can always block the offending IP address(es). |
|
:If opprobrium isn't enough to stop people--and in the first nine months of Wikipedia's existence, that has been enough--we can always block the offending IP address(es). |
|
:The more people there are to abuse it, the more people there are to ward off the abuse: if all the writers are also editors (see Wikipedia policy), the few malicious elements are hopeless outgunned. As traffic increases, so does the number of people who work on and care about the project. We do not have a static number of "editors" who are responsible for editing everything; the number of people who do editing-type work increases directly in proportion to the number of people working on the encyclopedia. |
|
:The more people there are to abuse it, the more people there are to ward off the abuse: if all the writers are also editors (see Wikipedia policy), the few malicious elements are hopelessly outgunned. As traffic increases, so does the number of people who work on and care about the project. We do not have a static number of "editors" who are responsible for editing everything; the number of people who do editing-type work increases directly in proportion to the number of people working on the encyclopedia. |
|
:Moreover--and this is something that you might not be able to understand very well if you haven't actually experienced it--there is a fair bit of (mostly friendly) peer pressure, and community standards are constantly being reinforced. The cranks and partisans, etc., are not simply outgunned. They also receive considerable oppobrium if they abuse the system. |
|
:Moreover--and this is something that you might not be able to understand very well if you haven't actually experienced it--there is a fair bit of (mostly friendly) peer pressure, and community standards are constantly being reinforced. The cranks and partisans, etc., are not simply outgunned. They also receive considerable opprobrium if they abuse the system. |
|
:The largest concerns have been in the mathematical section of the site, which indeed is limited, which at present is limited by HTML itself, which was never meant to display mathematical formulas. People are invited to work actively on the problems; for an update, join Wikipedia-L and post aa question. |
|
:The largest concerns have been in the mathematical section of the site, which indeed is limited, which at present is limited by HTML itself, which was never meant to display mathematical formulas. People are invited to work actively on the problems; for an update, join Wikipedia-L and post a question. |
![[Home]](wikipedia.png)