Mt Rainier Elevation Survey | Hacker News Reader

Mt Rainier Elevation Survey

countryhighpoints.com

51 pointsnickswalker11 comments

Interesting factoid:

One of the measurements in the early (or early-mid?) 1900's came out as an even hundred, something like 14,400, but they didn't think people would believe that was the actual measurement so they added or subtracted a few feet so it looked better.

Source: World Book encyclopedias printed sometime in the early 70's

> Editors of the page appear to be non-experts in the field and biased against me personally for unknown reasons.

They are likely non-experts in measuring mountains, but may be experts in updating wikipedia.

While it's always possible they hold some unreasonable grudge, it's also possible this new data hasn't yet met the criteria wikipedia has.

This data is so new, you might just want to wait a while (especially before throwing personal accusations). Rainier will still be there.

You're the second person to quote that sentence, but it isn't visible at the linked page. Has it been edited out of the article?

Yes, it looks like it has been removed.

A good edit, IMO.

"Editors of the [Wikipedia] page appear to be non-experts in the field and biased against me personally for unknown reasons... It is unfortunate that Wikipedia cannot be trusted as a reliable source of information."

No, you cannot be trusted over the USGS (US Geological Survey). This is an important thing to understand when editing Wikipedia. It's not enough to be an expert in the field (other editors have no idea what your experience is). Peer-reviewed, published data from an official source is always going to be more trusted than data in a blog post.

Actually in this case he can be trusted more than the USGS, as he took a more recent measurement.

This is a known shortcoming of Wikipedia’s model, which is optimized to manage conflicts between editors rather than optimized for accuracy.

Okay, so the author linked to the Seattle Times for a published citation of their measurement. And indeed the author's measurements are confirmed by Signani in that very same article:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/mount-...

That looks to me like a legitimate Wikipedia source. Plus it's recent and doesn't seem to be disputed by any other recent article.

Is there a reason I'm missing on why this person isn't being allowed to update the elevation for Mt Rainier on Wikipedia?

> Peer-reviewed, published data from an official source is always going to be more trusted than data in a blog post.

Such is the reverance for official sources on Wikipedia that quite often you'll find that the cited source doesn't actually support the article's content.

If you add a correct-looking fact referencing a correct-looking .gov source to a Wikipedia article, the likelihood of your edit being reverted is very low.

The data in this blog post is peer reviewed by an expert.

Isn’t that just an appeal to authority?

Yes, and we can (somewhat humorously) reference Wikipedia's own page on the "argument from authority" page to dig in to the fallacy. [1]

Quoting Wikipedia: "scientific knowledge is best established by evidence and experiment rather than argued through authority". The author of this post has collected evidence, presented it, and had it reviewed by a domain expert (Larry Signani is the person who first surveyed Rainier using GPS in 1998).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#Use_in...

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