> On Dec 14, 2016, at 11:31 AM, Helmut Raulien <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I am currently concerned with thermodynamics (to design new motors and heat 
> pumps, and solve all the energy problems of the world, of course, what else), 
> and in the german-language-Wikipedia about thermodynamic work ("Technische 
> Arbeit", "Volumenarbeit"), I have seen that one of these articles is about 
> half wrong, and the other close to completely.

I suspect a lot of these issues have to do with high level editors/managers. 
You’d think that one could just look at the English site to see changes. I 
don’t know how the other wikipedias are run or their connection to the main 
English site. The error I remembered best dealing with Noether’s Theorem and 
energy conservation wasn’t in the English version anymore for instance.

> Clark, you wrote, that Wikipedia does not have a discussion around the issue. 
> Well, the german Wikipedia has, but now I am wondering which way is better: 
> If the is no possibility for discussion, objectors are forced to edit the 
> article, if they have found a mistake and feel obliged to correct it.

Again a lot has to do with how movements to make corrections are organized.

Part of the issue though is just the structural layout choices of wikipedia. 
The list of changes and discussion is kept separate from the main change. Most 
people I bet don’t even realize it’s there or why it might be worth reading. 
Also I notice that older discussions seem to disappear from wikipedia.

Contrast this with say Stack Overflow’s various topics where the questions and 
attempted answers are all there to read. On contentious subjects they require 
people with success answering questions be the only ones to answer. Reading the 
back and forth informs us that inquiry is more a type of dialog than merely 
dogmatic answers. 

That’s not to say there aren’t many issues with Stack Overflow. In particular 
it still in some ways has the same problem wikipedia did 10 years ago - many 
topics aren’t mature enough to have really stabilized. It’s not hard to find 
questions that have no answer at all, for instance.


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