Why Wikipedia cannot claim the earth is not flat
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Then I stopped editing anything there, and I stopped treating wikipedia as a source of any reliable information.
You know the saying: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.".
There's excesses and errors on Wikipedia but overall I think it is ok. Just use a skeptic mindset when reading things, just like for any other source.
If you are a professional then, it takes a single day to find that Wikipedia is ruled by brats and its not your place.
It sounds like that professional tried to use Wikipedia as his free PR soapbox and found it hard to post propaganda when his submissions are under scrutiny.
I've seen that before, with a PR guy trying to create a wikipedia article to sell the event he was organizing and link to it from other sources. Oddly enough, he also criticized wikipedia's editors for being childish and irrational. Meanwhile, he failed to notice the irony or even the fact that he was directly going against wikipedia's spam rules.
So what?
It's your job to present proof that the collaboration existed, and it's your job to convince others that the information you're providing is accurate.
And more, submitting a dubious article for deletion is actually just a request for other users to evaluate the merits of the article on their own, and they vote based on the information you provide and the case you make to support your position.
And there's the rub. On Wikipedia, 'truth' is determined by the most powerful players on the page.
These are people with whom you simply can't reason. Any argument you provide will be shot down with the absurdest of reasons.
Personally, I'm glad this happened to me. Like you, that experience cemented the unreliability of wikipedia in my mind.
I apologize, but I’m a little unclear on what you’re asking for. Let me know and I’m happy to provide.
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be the case, specifically with talk pages where the history of the discussion with the editor who deemed it a “hoax” was, but you can see some remnants of it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Random_Hacks_of_K...
I wasn’t the one who made the edits to the page itself, but I was involved in collecting the links to prove it wasn’t a “hoax” and helping make the case to the editor who refused to believe it was true.
But for some pages it's a competition on who has the most free time and the most willingness to navigate the bureaucracy (and none of those items implies greater knowledge of the subject, quite the opposite)
That was a page about a database. I've added an info, that this database has a feature. Someone removed that. I have added links to documentation stating that yes, there is this feature.
And I'm not going to argue with them. Let me write it so you will understand it: I JUST DON'T CARE.
Let them argue in their own kindergarten. I have more interesting things to work on. I can always make another training where I teach people that this database has this feature.
I don't have links now, but there are quite known cases where a professor, who spent 20 years on a topic, writes something about this topic, and gets over voted by the bunch of kids, who have no idea about the whole thing.
It is not fair. The default is a negative, and its up to the author to convince everyone to add specific information to the global collective. It is also susceptible to attacks from popular opinion, which is a common theme for practically all major breakthroughs. Being "right" has a long history of not being enough at the short time, while social cliques has a long history of allowing the "wrong" facts.
The question however remains: what is a better process? If they had the HN models, your edit could just as easily be downvoted by that "guy" and his support. They could abandon the deletionism model but then limit google/wikipedia search to only show articles that has been approved by the "featured article" process, but which would result in zero traffic for most articles and effort spent on Wikipedia.
As it should be.
That's how false positives get filtered out, even at the risk of losing some minor true positives in the process.
If your contributions are solid then they are kept in. If they are not then keep it in your blog.
To put this into context it would be like a non American saying the next biggest festival to Mardi Gras isn't noteworthy.
> This maneuvering and filibustering is soon likely to exhaust the patience of any reasonable person who naturally prefers not to reason with the unreasonable, and who, unlike the advocate, has no special interest or passion other than striving to maintain neutrality. Additionally, by continually engaging fringe advocates in endless argument, you run the risk of turning Wikipedia into a battleground or a debating society. At the present time, Wikipedia does not have an effective means to address superficially polite but tendentious, long-term, fringe advocacy.
This is definitely a very, very hard problem.
I've only ever written one article, which has gone unchallenged for over two years now, probably because the topic is abstruse and difficult for everyone to understand in the first place (which is why I wrote the article):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medcouple
But I've also made minor edits here and there. For example, I removed some fluff around the D3.js article. Also unchallenged:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=D3.js&diff=803775...
So, if you hear stories about how awful editing Wikipedia is, remember that it can also be a pleasant experience.
A says X but B says not X.
You edit it to read
A says X but left-wing commentator B says not X.
The qualification "left-wing commentator" is, for the purposes of this discussion, entirely accurate. However, the effect is that B now looks like they're biased whilst A, with no qualifying adjectives, looks impartial.
Now consider that it's entirely possible that A is _also_ accurately described as a "left-wing commentator" and you see why this stuff is so pernicious.
Anything about Israel/Palestine is crawling with minor edits like this.
Wikipedia is just reflecting reality here. Even in Israel, unbiased narratives are very difficult to find from either side. This is compounded by the self-hating Jew phenomenon [1] and the issue that many Palestinians actually _prefer_ living in a modern, Western democracy as opposed to the kingdoms and dictatorships which are the traditional Arab norma. So we have people on _both sides_ arguing for _both sides_, often using subtle trickery such as weasel words, unjustified quantifiers and adjectives, and selected elimination. Being a technically advanced country, this spills out onto the Internet and Wikipedia.
Personally, being involved in the situation, a _lack_ of such trickery on Wikipedia would raise more red flags for me than its presence.
You are right that the Christian and Muslim citizens of the West Bank (I'll just say Palestinians in interest of brevity) do _not_ enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, and are in fact treated poorly by the state compared to their Jewish neighbors. I'm one of their Jewish neighbors (I live in the West Bank) and we see it daily. However, these people (from what they tell me) do recognize that even with Israeli-imposed curfews e.g. on Yom Kippor, and restricted rights compared to Jews, they still live better than their brothers in Jordan and other Arab states. They drink cleaner water, have better job security, better health care, better education, better chances to improve the livelyhood of their children, and so many other advantages compared to Jordanian, Syrian, or Egyptians. This is coming from them, as I always take an opportunity to ask.
Of course, I would love to see them enjoy the same rights as I do. I don't see them as competition, rather I believe that we both flourish together when we cooperate. But even without all the benefits of a Western-style democracy that the government _could_ provide to them, they still prefer that government to the alternatives that they see right next door.
If is long enouh in there it will never get out.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-a-raccoon-became...
First, you publish an article on some news source, asserting the fact.
Then you update Wikipedia with that fact, citing your own article.
Other news sources check Wikipedia, find your new fact, and incorporate it into their own articles. Now you have a bunch of extra sources for your Wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...
Ultimately, we learn by reading and experiencing, not by being told. Hence, wikiepedia's goal to provide verifiable information makes the trick. It is the best way to allow us to explore and learn, and hence form our belief about the truth.
> Point out that if Wikipedia had been around at the time of Galileo, it would have had a duty to report the claims of the Catholic church as fact, without qualification, despite the conspiracy that undoubtedly existed.
I really appreciate Wikipedia, I love the ideal, and I respect it as a source of knowledge, and I respect the community... but some behaviours are really bizarre.
- Write a comment on the article's talk page about a spelling mistake in the article itself? If so, why not directly modify the article?
- Modify an existing comment on the talk page to correct a spelling mistake in that comment? If so, I can see why that would be seen as étiquette-breaking.
This is wrong. If you disagree about transliteration, you should have added a comment of your own with the supporting documentation you mention, without removing the other user's transliteration from their comments.
The fact that the software did not automatically prevent this is irrelevant. My bank's software will let me spend money I don't have, and charge me overdraft fees after the fact; that doesn't mean I had the money to spend since the software let me. Here on HN, that seems to be worst possible justification or rationalization for behavior everyone else both there and here is telling you is not okay.
Would be much better if talk pages acted like actual chat boards.
I didn’t “vandalise” the other contributor’s comment willy-nilly. I corrected the spelling, but I explicitly left a mention of what it had been before I changed the spelling, why my spelling was better, a reference to sources and citations thereof, and so forth.
Editing someone else's comment is vandalism, not contribution.
I didn’t just change his spelling. I edited his spelling, but I left the previous state (in another section), explained what I had done and why, provided sources and citations as to why my transliteration was preferable, and took clear ownership of what I had done and why I had done it.
And what you did was doubly rude because you acknowledge that your version was "preferable"; that is, it is conceivable that the other user prefers their version. They may be wrong to do so, but by editing their words directly you are denying them their right to an opinion. It is not surprising at all that your edit was reverted.
However I have difficulty agreeing with you on your second paragraph, indeed it is the exact opposite of what I deeply believe: I am convinced that there is an objective truth, and that one of the things where there is prevailing conviction as to what is correct spelling wand what is not. Words have meaning by virtue of convention, and if you do not pursue the convention, you are reneging on the certainty of being able to unambiguously and intelligibly commune with others.
Additionally there is spam. Spam need to be detected and removed from the talk space and administrators can't be the only one with permission to do that.
That said, there is no excuse that the UI don't inform you about the current norms that exist.
Btw, I highly doubt it was an admin that gave you that warning. It was probably a regular user.
It's jut one simple link they need to add, I don't understand what stops them, afaik they can even render the talk pages as mobile, they just fail to link to it from the mobile article page.
And while at it, on mobile if you open an image it should load the plain image file, not with all the sticky floating crap around it such that when you zoom in the sticky floating crap goes over the image itself...
Of most websites I assume the sticky floating crap is there to "engage" users to get more ad revenue (to permanently show all the social like buttons and stuff), but I don't understand why wikipedia does similar antipatterns in their image viewer...
> ...even if there is a slim chance beliefs on the margin may eventually gain wide consensus (as happened with the proposals of the round Earth in Archaic Periods and continental drift before the mechanism of plate tectonics...)
After reading this line, I'm curious how this article would read with an example that was once a fringe theory that ultimately did gain widespread consensus.
Case in point, Dante's Divine Comedy (EDIT: Which the linked article does mention at the end) - completed 1320 - contains a very explicit description of the earth being round, complete with describing time differences due to the sun rising and setting at different times (Purgatory explicitly mentions that at the same time there is sunset in Jerusalem, midnight over the Ganges, and sunrise in Purgatory which he placed as a physical place on the opposite side of the earth), and how the stars would be different on different sides of the earth.
It'd be one thing if the evidence was all obscure, but somehow this myth managed to take hold despite the fact that one of the most famous literary works in history counters it (I guess that tells us something about how few people actually read the classics as opposed to just read about them).
(there are of course many other, and earlier, sources of evidence refuting this myth, but Dante provides one of the clearest and most explicit and, most importantly, famous ones)
Tldr, it's from the end of 19th century.
It's not about the misconception that the Earth is flat. It's about the myth that medieval Europeans believed the Earth is flat. That's not the same thing.
It too is about the "the myth that medieval Europeans believed the Earth is flat" and not about "the misconception that the Earth is flat".
It's just that it's called the "flat Earth myth" (instead of "flat Earth belief in the middle ages myth").
The linked article I was replying about was done so in the context that the Earth is flat is a 19th century myth. I was explaining the article they were linking to was not related to the same subject.
They just added the information that the belief that the middle ages believed the earth is flat is recent-ish.
His "Tl;dr" was meant to be for the link he provided, not the original article.
The fact that the earth is an oblate spheroid is a scientific fact with just as much certainty as the other claims are.
Being neutrality minded doesn't mean you can't outright dismiss false beliefs.
I once chatted to an Uber driver who insisted the Earth was flat. I told him the reason helicopters doesn't spin around the Earth is that they are within the atmosphere which spins with the Earth. He hadn't really considered that explanation before...
It as a light hearted discussion, I thought the encounter fun :) After the 2016 election Americans doesn't surprise me as much any more..
Isn't the actual reason simple inertia? They were already spinning with the Earth, unless there's a force canceling that, they'll just keep going.
It helps if an argument fits the belief system or thinking patters of the person you're talking to. What are the odds that a cab driver has never had a physics class where they really dug into newtons laws of motion and internalized that? I bet the ones that have don't think the earth is flat.
One might attack the inertia concept by using the idea of jumping on a train or bus, but that's one step removed from helicopters ;-)
That is actually how you need to approach most people when attempting to change their mind about something. Once you take a position or suggest that they have a position than may or may not be valid, you put them on the defensive. After that they will be trying to protect their belief and nothing will change them. If you approach a topic as an open light hearted discussion of ideas without judgement then there is some hope of change. From their point of view there may also be hope of you changing. I'm sure there's much to be said here about vulnerability and a two-way street.
The thing about flat Earth though is that it's so easy to prove. Just get in an airplane and fly to the edge :) I wonder why no amatuer pilots have done that, how hard can it be to find the edge? Hehe
It also makes you wonder about the distant future. I wonder if this comment will still be on the internet 2000 years from now, and if any human will read it. I'm pretty sure an AI will read it in the near future, if not right now.
"[...] However, this essay uses the flat earth as a metaphor for explaining Wikipedia policy, not to describe any authentic historical controversy."
— Very clever! (and also quite amusing ;)
By making your prototypical example of a dubious minority opinion the flat Earth theory, I think you risk falling into bad mental habits. If you go round thinking "people who disagree with me on subject X are just like flat Earthers" then you're doing both them and yourself a disservice -- yourself because no matter who you are it's certain that on some issues it's you who are wrong.
What I'm saying is that flat Earth is a bad example because it maps poorly onto just about any other real-world disagreement.
The 'how to reply' sections make it clear what most fringe theories try to rely on to convince editors, but Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted.
That's true, and it should be the case. But how do we distinguish between "that which is currently broadly accepted" and "that which is currently the leading theory but other theories are also quite widely accepted" and "that which is probably the leading theory, by a narrow margin, but then again might not be, because nobody does polls on this stuff, so we're basically just going by what wikipedia editors reckon"?
What, for instance, should we do if 80% of people believe theory A and 20% of people believe theory B? (Suppose this is one of those rare cases where we're fortunate enough to have actual polls).
They are a curiosity at best.
We have way more dangerous and widespread believes.
Like: did you know there is a way to cure malaria ? Cause i had malaria for years and everybody i knew, including my doctors and myself, believed it couldn't be cured.
And then i meet a guy from the pasteur institute (in france you can't get more serious than that, they are the nasa of biology) who told me that they had a perfectly fine protocol to kill the parasite in the liver for years. And using nothing more that regular malaron. So i went to the institute and indeed, they do.
Our society is working on a pile of false informations, obsolete data, incomplete thruths and lies. All with major consequences. It's human nature.
Flat earth it the least important of it. I'd say it's even a good thing cause it helps revealing very confused people or flaws in our educational system.
People are so screwed up.
"Radical cure. This term refers to both cure of blood-stage infection and prevention of relapses by killing hypnozoites (in P. vivax and P. ovale infections only)." (p. 4)
"The objective of treating malaria caused by P. vivax and P. ovale is to cure both blood-stage and liver-stage infections (called radical cure), thereby preventing recrudescence and relapse, respectively." (p. 61)
"The recommended treatment for radical cure of P. ovale relapsing malaria is the same as that for P. vivax, i.e. ACT or chloroquine combined with primaquine (total dose, 3.5 mg base/kg bw). [...] P. malariae and P. knowlesi do not form hypnozoites and so do not require radical cure with primaquine." (p. 290)
There's nothing there about P. falciparum, the major malaria parasite, but my understanding is that that also doesn't have a hypnozoite stage.
A recent paper "Challenges for achieving safe and effective radical cure of Plasmodium vivax" [2] suggests that this approach is well-accepted, but not yet a slam-dunk in the field.
[1] http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/162441/1/9789241549...
[2] https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
I just wish they would apply the same approach to marxism and related ideologies. So far it is called "scientific". LOL
I think nuance isn't so much the issue here as much as it is mistaking the map for the territory. A flat earth model has it's uses. Primarily for human-scale travel and mapping. But the topology of a sphere is inarguably far better than a flat plane. And if someone was to make the same mistake with a spherical model, they'd get a lot further before things break down.