Who actually writes all the wikipedia pages?

Yep.... company A paid us to investigate the superfood properties of carrots, in comparison to a diet of lard..... so they can quote it out of context and make astounding claims about carrots.
 
Mr Jack said:
Even my PI goes to Wikipedia for information. It's accessible, easy to access and at least as reliable as most information in the primary literature*.

* - I think people outside of Science fail to realise how unreliable work published in the scientific press is. This isn't a dig, by definition good journals should be publishing stuff from the frontiers of research; the nature of science means that this stuff is constantly changing and each paper only reports on a narrow experiment with a healthy dash of interpretation from its authors. A sizeable chunk of becoming familiar with a field is knowing which papers are reliable and which have turned out to be wide of the mark.
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The work that the press articles are based on is usually solid, it's the unfortunately incorrect and often sensationalist interpretation of that work which makes it unreliable.

Wikipedia can be updated in a matter of days, whilst work published in a journal is usually out of date before it hits my desk!
 
Rich_L said:
So kwerk remind me about your hobby of lawn-tending?

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18281032



Epic cool :cool:
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Ha, exactly. A guy who treats his lawn better than I imagine he'd treat his own children, keeps a pistol in a carrier bag in his shower 'just in case', has a bomb shelter full of girl scout cookies, and a bucket desk for his laptop where presumably he runs his bromance website from (and smokes himself silly over the pics) is actually calling other people "saddos". Brilliant.
 
G-MAN2004 said:
Ha, exactly. A guy who treats his lawn better than I imagine he'd treat his own children, keeps a pistol in a carrier bag in his shower 'just in case', has a bomb shelter full of girl scout cookies, and a bucket desk for his laptop where presumably he runs his bromance website from (and smokes himself silly over the pics) is actually calling other people "saddos". Brilliant.
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Where did I go wrong in life ending up in a giant house with a bunker full of guns and showcase grade landscaping, before even hitting 30? I really wished I had spent more time contributing to wikipedia articles. That would have been much more productive.
 
kwerk said:
Where did I go wrong in life ending up in a giant house with a bunker full of guns and showcase grade landscaping, before even hitting 30? I really wished I had spent more time contributing to wikipedia articles. That would have been much more productive.
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I don't know if you went wrong in your life, my guess is that it's some sort of compulsive behaviour. Do you feel safer with the guns, is it the look and touch of them, or the power of them that excites you? Perhaps it's a combination. Do you masturbate to the guns on their own, or do you fantasise about mowing a lawn while shooting off a gun and that's what gets you off?
 
kwerk said:
Where did I go wrong in life ending up in a giant house with a bunker full of guns and showcase grade landscaping, before even hitting 30? I really wished I had spent more time contributing to wikipedia articles. That would have been much more productive.
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If having a nice garden and a couple of firearms in your basement is what you consider having 'made it', I would hate to see what you would call failure......


Contributing to Wikipedia takes very little time, far less than the amount you spend trolling about on this forum.....
 
Kwerk, can I have the following information from you:

Date and town of birth
A picture of you
A picture of your lawn

Im writing a Wikipedia article (its not about you chill out dawg) and need the above information for some reason.
 
kwerk said:
Where did I go wrong in life ending up in a giant house with a bunker full of guns and showcase grade landscaping, before even hitting 30? I really wished I had spent more time contributing to wikipedia articles. That would have been much more productive.
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Yes, because living life as a paranoid homophobic with a grass fetish is so awesome right? Damn, I feel so sorry for all those Wiki contributors who must be sitting there right now wishing they could have a super amazing lawn that is so brilliant, every blade of grass turns to follow the sun.
 
kwerk said:
Every professional lawn crew I know of around here is run by people in their 20s/30s. Lawn care is a young man's game, especially in the 100F heat it gets up to here.
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Really??

Everyone one I know in that area range from 18-50 and are all on minimum wage because it's such a brainless job!
 
Castiel said:
If having a nice garden and a couple of firearms in your basement is what you consider having 'made it', I would hate to see what you would call failure......


Contributing to Wikipedia takes very little time, far less than the amount you spend trolling about on this forum.....
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I'm very content where I am and I'm sure 99% ;) of Americans would love to be where I'm at so I'd say I've made it to the American dream.

I don't think being prepared for emergencies is odd either, it's the same reason I have house insurance, life insurance, flood insurance, umbrella policy, living trust etc.

What more am I supposed to be doing? Buying a bunch of trinkets off ocuk, binge drinking, watching TV, maybe the cliched backpacking around Asia? What?

Anyway the difference between here and wikipedia is wikipedia is mildly educational, I post here purely for entertainment and a bit of schadenfreude. And the more replies I get the more entertaining it is, and the more emotional the replies (like G-MAN's) the even more entertaining it is.

This kind of sums it up http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=21830669&postcount=14

I can't honestly think of one useful thing I've learned on this forum the whole time being here.
 
kwerk said:
I'm very content where I am and I'm sure 99% ;) of Americans would love to be where I'm at so I'd say I've made it to the American dream.

I don't think being prepared for emergencies is odd either, it's the same reason I have house insurance, life insurance, flood insurance, umbrella policy, living trust etc.

What more am I supposed to be doing? Buying a bunch of trinkets off ocuk, binge drinking, watching TV, maybe the cliched backpacking around Asia? What?

Anyway the difference between here and wikipedia is wikipedia is mildly educational, I post here purely for entertainment and a bit of schadenfreude. And the more replies I get the more entertaining it is, and the more emotional the replies (like G-MAN's) the even more entertaining it is.

This kind of sums it up http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=21830669&postcount=14

I can't honestly think of one useful thing I've learned on this forum the whole time being here.
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The point is however that you have been pretty derogatory to people who contribute to Wikipedia, refering to them as saddos, when the same could be said of your obsession with a patch of grass and a few guns......

It is good that you are content with your life, lawn and Les Baers, but don't you think that the scientist, historian, linguist, et al who contribute to Wikipedia are just as likely to be as content with their lives and their idiosyncratic pasttimes?

You may call them saddos, but the truth is, you are probably no different from them and given your excessive preoccupation with your lawn it could be argued that you fit your own definition more succinctly than they.
 
I am one those saddos who writes pages in a few areas. Why?

Well because most people do not have access to expensive medical journals. The articles in those journals are largely written by people as an academic component of a course or a career path and they have little experience in the practical applications of the theoretical concepts to place them directly into practice. Moreover, in one of my areas of interest a great deal of the research is tainted by association with some bogus theoretical work in the past. I like to make people aware that previously supposedly academic work is tainted and therefore the assumptions based upon it are by default. I have got the experience along with the theoretical knowledge.

So yes I am one of those saddos. One of those saddos who thinks that knowledge should be shared and not held for personal benefit. And as someone who has that knowledge in a few specific areas I believe that Wikipedia is a very good tool to reach out to people across the planet. And in my field there is only one other person (a Japanese bloke) who is contributing and I would rather we did it than somebody who did not fully understand the subject. So call me a saddo if you want but if your kid pitches up at some DGH and the paeds doc there looks up what we posted in a niche field and does not do something that he would think is the right course of action (because in that specific case it would not be) and your kid comes through better for it then I guess you would see things in a different light.
 
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