List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I was going to write "For all its faults..." but I suddenly realised that Wikipedia has never been anything less than fantastic in anything I've experienced. All the bad stuff has been related to me 3rd hand and the vast majority of it seemed to be coming from cranks with axes to grind.
I'm saddened that it isn't celebrated more, but take solace in the fact that it has, fairly quietly considering, become a fundamental part of the internet and our society.
Every wikipedia critic I know used to be a huge wikipedia fan until something they deeply cared about was either screwed up, vandalized, or deleted.
I bet one internet cookie that if/when this happens to you, you will be as passionately anti-wikipedia as you are now pro-wikipedia.
On the other hand, I know one of the administrators there, and he has shown me several pages of the hate-mongering he gets, mostly for just being an admin. Some of it has merit (for example, a good chunk of it was because of one particular article he moderated, and the side that lost did not lose gracefully), but most of it is just people jumping on him because they feel they are being denied their right to, well, write.
I rarely see any well thought out, cohesive arguments for re-structuring wikipedia. Most of what I see is little more than "I hate that admin, he said I wasn't notable enough for a page. Lets go egg his house!"
I see no reason for an internet encyclopedia to copy the shortcomings of a paper encyclopedia as closely as wikipedia does.
Paper and shelf space are expensive and limited, you have to limit the articles and the article size.
On the other hand, HD space is cheap and text small and easily greatly compressed.
Searching in paper is hard. Searching on a computer is easy. There's no reason to have one article be THE article. Articles could be write only, unmodifiable, and search-able by their contents, their ranking by the general public, their ranking by a group of experts, their ranking of any selected group, by the hash of their text, etc.
There could be some built in redundancy, like a short encyclopedia style article on top of an incredibly deep Ph.D level dissertation article.
In short, I find wikipedia cludgy and inexplicably mimicking the short comings of paper.
Yes, there are a few (such as the examples to improve citizendium). The first would be to remove anonymity. If the editors are know it would improve quality and would help to bring in specialists from fields.
Currently WP is now a vehicle for anonymous slander. Lies simply get repeated. Things do not have to be true – it just have to be on another website.
Back then it could still be saved by tons of people saying WP:ILIKEIT. But if it wasn't for the fact that some 19th-century writer had the idea of compiling the exact same kind of list, the thing would probably be deleted under today's standards.
PS I donated to Wikimedia last year, so I'm willing to contribute until the project finds a more sustainable model.
Monetization, non-compromosing and neutral have trouble playing nice with each other.
It seems like a good way to go, if you can just raise the millions needed. Maybe some billionaire can set Wikipedia up with a trust fund...
You know your expenses pretty well, so it's easy to plan it that far ahead.
Or coupon bonds, which pay interest regularly with a fixed amount and on a fixed schedule (set at purchase time for as long as 30 years).
Slightly more risky since they are not FDIC insured, but if you hold to maturity you have zero risk due to market fluctuations, only a risk of the firm going bankrupt totally.
They turned them down. I guess that's where the non-compromising comes in - despite google offering to be totally hands off, just free hosting.
If you're proposing, let's hear the proposal...
http://www.pbs.org/roperpoll2009/
Oh, wait...
"PBS remains the network with the most trusted news and public affairs programs, with 43% trusting its programs a “great deal.” CNN came in second with 28% and FOX News third at 27%."
;->
Exceptions to this are Kubbitzes (sp?) and small voluntary communes, which have their own problems but at least you can leave them!
I found some amazing quotes (linked to from the article):
It is cited that the Burmese king Nanda Bayin, in 1599 "laughed to death when informed by a visiting Italian merchant that Venice was a free state without a king
London Beer Flood, 9 people were killed when 323,000 imperial gallons (1 468 000 L) of beer in the Meux and Company Brewery burst out of their vats and gushed into the streets.
incent Smith II, an employee at the Cocoa Services Inc. chocolate factory in Camden, New Jersey, was loading chunks of raw chocolate when he slipped and fell into a large melting tank filled with 120oF (50oC) chocolate, and was knocked out by one of the mixing paddles. Smith was trapped in the melting tank for 10 minutes before rescuers were able to extract him. He was declared dead a short time later.
Hmmm beer, laughter or chocolate?
He did.
Not quite killed by his invention, though.
A similar robot was sent for Church, but he couldn't understand it's lisp.
It's related to a funny story that goes like this:
What if Bach had died before writing the WTK, then that music would not exist today, but all of us would be totally free to come up with it. Since Bach did live to write the WTK we don't have to wonder what it would be like if it did not exist.
Now what other stuff would he have done if he had lived even longer...
The problem with such thought experiments is that even though in theory we can come up with all the music that a composer would have written had they lived several hundred years longer in practice we probably will never do that because we are not that composer.
For art this is easy enough because we readily admit to an artist bringing something unique to the table, why else would an 'original' be worth a load of money (it's uniqueness being the direct consequence of the hand of the master). For scientific things that is a lot less clear.
I'm sure plenty of stuff will be invented anyway, no matter who comes up with it the first time. But that may not be true for all scientific ideas.
With Turing, it's entirely possible that he could have come up with a novel way of looking at things, or an invention, which we have not achieved today. Thus, even if at some point, all technical discoveries have been made that would have been made in Turing's natural lifespan, we would be much farther along at any point in time if we had those contributions, and our way of looking at our field might be richer.
Seems to be a little violation of NPOV, and a very sad one at that, but I can't help but grin.
Talk about a bad demo day ...