Guillaume, More power to you! I have contributed to a variety of Wikipedia topics, and find that there are two kinds of articles:
-- where everyone is cooperating and if there is controversy, that it is dealt with in an objective manner, with references to outside sources. So in this case we could say "almost every geostatistics text published begins from a consideration of random fields..." etc. and then explain that briefly; a dissenting opinion would be dealt with objectively "a few statisticians maintain that...", with cited reference to the arguments of Jan Merks or whomever. -- where one or a few people obstinately push their interpretations to the top, with no regard to neutrality. Now, they might be correct in the long run!! (I mean, the earth COULD be flat....) but that is not the intent of the Wikipedia article. Contrarian views to, for example, plate tectonics are interesting IF they are coherent -- a big IF given all the evidence in favour -- but OBJECTIVELY they are not important at the moment except as cited footnotes. I have been discouraged in those articles where chaos reigns and the community does not respect the Wikipedia guidelines. It becomes a vain fight. So I do not contribute any more to those articles. I stay active when everyone has a win-win attitude. BUT I encourage you to try -- I will try to back you up by rapidly removing non-Wikipedia materials. David Rossiter University of Twente/ITC Enschede (NL) On 11 Jan2010, at 12:31, Guillaume Larocque, Mr wrote: > Hi all, I just happened to notice that the first result from a search for > "geostatistics" in Google is the Wikipedia article . If you go have a look, > you will notice that this article is in a terrible shape and completely lacks > relevant information. I do not wish to open "the" can of worms, but you may > not be surprised to learn that Jan Merks has done his share to make the page > the way it is. I was thinking that if a few of us on the mailing list make a > small effort, we could easily make that page much more informative, while > remaining objective, in a very short period of time. In light of the recent > discussion on geostatistical software, an expended list of software could be > useful also. > > Perhaps unfortunately, Wikipedia has become for many the main source of quick > information on various aspects of statistics (as well as pretty much anything > else). I think other geostatistics-related pages (e.g. "variogram" and > "kriging") are in a much better shape, although Merks has also left his trace > there too. Again, I don't want to open a can of worms... sorry if I do. > > I'll try to spend a bit of time on this in the next few days or weeks. Please > feel free to help me if you have the desire and time to do so, particularly > if you have some ready-to-use summaries about the history or the basics of > geostatistics. > > Cheers, > > Guillaume Larocque, PhD > Research Associate, > Macdonald Campus of McGill University > + > + To post a message to the list, send it to ai-geost...@jrc.ec.europa.eu > + To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@ jrc.ec.europa.eu with no subject > and "unsubscribe ai-geostats" in the message body. DO NOT SEND > Subscribe/Unsubscribe requests to the list > + As a general service to list users, please remember to post a summary of > any useful responses to your questions. > + Support to the forum can be found at http://www.ai-geostats.org/ Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) University of Twente E-mail disclaimer The information in this e-mail, including any attachments, is intended for the addressee only. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution or action in relation to the content of this information is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail by mistake, please delete the message and any attachment and inform the sender by return e-mail. ITC accepts no liability for any error or omission in the message content or for damage of any kind that may arise as a result of e-mail transmission. + + To post a message to the list, send it to ai-geost...@jrc.ec.europa.eu + To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@ jrc.ec.europa.eu with no subject and "unsubscribe ai-geostats" in the message body. DO NOT SEND Subscribe/Unsubscribe requests to the list + As a general service to list users, please remember to post a summary of any useful responses to your questions. + Support to the forum can be found at http://www.ai-geostats.org/
