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![[parent]](http://images.planetmath.org:8080/images/uparrow.png) Viewing Message
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| ``Re: Wikipedia has a bad reputation''
by stux on 2005-12-09 21:04:30 |
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| I'm not really sure about the copyright issues... likely not. But removing the offending text rather than removing the whole thread might be more beneficial.
To respond to the article: I too have found the mathematics section of Wikipedia to be very reliable. It is my opinion that the article is blowing the whole issue way out of proportion. The fact that anyone can edit articles makes the entire system prone to vandalism, and it is inevitable with that design. It doesn't help that Wikipedia is the largest wiki in the world. Volunteers help revert that, but some of it can still fall through the cracks. Planetmath is unique in several ways I think: it is not as popular as Wikipedia, and would not attract as many vandals. Planetmath pages use a more intricate permissions scheme making it difficult for vandalism to occur randomly. Finally, not many people know LaTeX, making it hard for would-be vandals to well... deface math formulas (if such a thing can even be done). It also seems that the culture of physics and math pages to have developed differently from the rest: it seems many experts have devoted their time an effort to creating and protecting math and science pages, whereas the general pages have a more varied set of contributors. As a final point: math and science related articles are easily proved or disproved based on our body of knowledge. Topics such as politics and current events deal more with social issues that are not as "black and white" and so are more prone to bias.
P.S. I really wished the MediaWiki software provided a spell checker. |
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