User:Bth
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Contents |
[edit] Subpages
- User:Bth/Sandbox (currently: very old elementsbox noodling)
- My cleanup taskforce desk
[edit] Handy links
- Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace
- Humanities hist
- Science hist
- Mathematics hist
- Language hist
- Miscellaneous hist
[edit] Half-hearted anti-immediatist mini-rant
Wikipedia has got much more immediatist since I was last doing any serious editing, which rather depresses me. Wikipedia's unique nature certainly causes the sort of problems the immediatists are trying to combat but the simple fact is that it's impossible for them to have a 100% success rate. At any given moment, dozens of people are looking at vandalised or more-or-less-subtly POV or just plain bad pages.
IMO the best way for new non-contributing readers to learn to recognise this sort of thing is for the construction work to be out in the open; they'll quickly see that different pages are at radically different stages. Trying to cover everything over as quickly as possible means that they'll have a harder time reaching the point of developing the sort of instincts we all have about when an article can and can't be trusted.
Frankly, the immediatist movement seems to me a rather cowering response to the tired old "I went to Wikipedia and it was wrong about fact X" argument -- yes, some people might be turned off by the first page they see and never come back but those people aren't likely to stick around too long in the best of cases because they're the sort who have philosophical differences with the entire project, so we shouldn't be catering for them.
Wikipedia's difference is its strength as well as its weakness. We should stop pretending to be something we're not.
[edit] To Do
[edit] General
- Gravitational collapse conflates three separate topics, has no cites, contains a horrible howler and is generally a mess.
- Polycylic aromatic hydrocarbons ought to mention the Astrochemistry side of things.
- I want Wikipedia to have an article on photometric redshifts, just 'cos.
- Left Behind (series) needs balance in the criticism section. Possible source for Catholic POV, also need to find some people criticising it from a modern Biblical scholarship perspective. Criticism from Counterpunch
- Try and find out what's going on with Mansa Musa, his hajj and his dead mother and if there's verifiable info add it to the pedia (as per Humanities Ref Desk, April 13th).
- Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World is on the cleanup list, and I want to do it.
[edit] 25 Things
My 43 things list includes a goal of writing 25 RAs. This is a list of some topics I'm considering doing towards that:
- Weber bar
- Cosmological distance equations
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