On 2 October 2010 19:09, <[email protected]> wrote: > You can sit in your padded room and throw your toys around in a temper > tantrum, but that still won't change anything will it.
While WJohnson's manner is perhaps unnecessarily brusque here, this is the point: what to do about this? Wikipedia does appear to have fallen into its own folk ontology: an answer to the question "what is knowledge?" that is simple and obvious enough for smart high school students. And I'm not meaning to denigrate smart high school students - but they haven't even had four years of wrangling with the issue of "how do we know what we know?" at undergraduate level. Almost-right answers are easy, really solid procedures are rather more difficult. I put forward the computational biology answer (and I had singularly failed to notice Magnus Manske's name amongst the authors), which is ten things that I do think will help a lot. The hard part, then, is how to get idiots a bit less out of experts' faces. And it does affect the sciences - whenever politics is involved. I give you the global warming articles, where an actual no-foolin' renowned expert had right-wing American fundies trying to vote him off the wiki. This suggests the problem is: how do you *get across to* someone that they're just ignorant, in a manner that is duplicable across the wiki, and do that without breaking our spectacular successes so far? - d. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
