From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/6747 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Robert Dawson Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: Comments on a wikipedia article on a Timeline of Category theory Date: Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:57:30 -0300 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: Robert Dawson NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1310170924 4039 80.91.229.12 (9 Jul 2011 00:22:04 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2011 00:22:04 +0000 (UTC) To: "categories@mta.ca" Original-X-From: majordomo@mlist.mta.ca Sat Jul 09 02:21:59 2011 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from smtpx.mta.ca ([138.73.1.30]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1QfLIy-0003CA-KK for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Sat, 09 Jul 2011 02:21:56 +0200 Original-Received: from mlist.mta.ca ([138.73.1.63]:35729) by smtpx.mta.ca with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1QfLGq-0005UN-CM; Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:19:44 -0300 Original-Received: from majordomo by mlist.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1QfLGp-0006mq-Me for categories-list@mlist.mta.ca; Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:19:43 -0300 In-Reply-To: Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:6747 Archived-At: This is the sort of article that Wikipedia necessarily does badly at - as anybody who thinks about it for a few minutes must realize would be the case. An ad hoc committee not in regular communication can often do a very good job of putting together a collection of facts. Connections between facts are harder because they are often not explicitly in the literature - and Wikipedia [correctly - there are other fora for that] discourages "original research" and "opinion". Similarly, balanced emphasis in long articles is difficult because (as intended) no one person writes all of it, and if the person writing about non-normal whiffle theorists has more spare time and enthusiasm than the person writing on quasinormal whiffle theorists, the non-normal group end up with disproportionate coverage. (For obvious reasons, the less-prolific writer would not be popular if [s]he ripped out an inexpert selection of several hours of the other writer's work to correct this!) And omissions are problematic. In a good single-author article, we could conclude that if there was nothing about X's contributions to the field, they were probably quite minor. A Wikipedia article does not permit this deduction. Can't we just accept that Wikipedia has its weaknesses as well as its strengths? For instance, in a paper encyclopedia you would be lucky to find an article on category theory at all; Wikipedia does not have to keep within (say) 15,000 pages for all topics. This article is probably fairly reliable on who _was_ working on what when; it should not be trusted for who was _not_ working on something, or whose work was most important, and may be dubious on priority. To damn it for this is like damning a thesaurus for not being an etymological dictionary - a sign that somebody is contemplating using a specialized tool for the wrong purpose. Robert Dawson [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]