User talk:Connelly/Archived comments

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Contents 1 Comments 2 Does Wikipedia Have Authority? 3 Triple product rule 4 Kitschy (or whatever) ashtray

[edit] Comments

Hello Connelly, I have not been doing the wiki thing for a long while so I just spotted your message to me about the weeds at Commons.

All answers are to be found at here: http://members.chello.se/solgrop/3dtree.htm

Have a nice day =)

// Solkoll (who did not bother to log in =)

[edit] Does Wikipedia Have Authority?

You said what I thought in an easy to read manner. Thanks :) - FrancisTyers · 18:56, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for reading my essay. I mostly wrote it in response to really negative opinions of various academic types about Wikipedia. One professor thought Wikipedia wouldn't work when I showed it to him back in 2004 (he argued using "the Second Law of thermodynamics"...this despite there being ~100,000 articles at the time which were useful to me in my studies at school). Other professors thought that Wikipedia was unreliable and so shouldn't be used. I could understand if they didn't want Wikipedia citations, but they objected to the general existence of Wikipedia. My friend (who likes reading AI research papers) said at one point that he had "lost [his] faith in Wikipedia" because it contained an apparently incorrrect statement about measurable functions. I asked him if he had fixed the mistake and he said "no." He then kept talking about how he had lost his faith in Wikipedia. But what did he expect? I mean, really. As far as the professors go, I think their arguments mostly just reveal the (I think unwise) hostility of academic types towards everything that is not peer reviewed and "verified." I shouldn't criticize them too much, as it's the nature of their social system to encourage such behavior. But general rules such as "verification is necessary" shouldn't interfere with one's perception of reality, nor one's judgement of new technologies, like Wikipedia. I think that people should at least be realistic about Wikipedia: (a) It's one of the most significant archives of knowledge in the history of humanity. (b) It's not always reliable. (c) It usually is. (d) Realistically, points b and c hold for professors as well. (e) It gives the whole picture, as single persons and organizations are loathe to do. (f) I practically never open textbooks (many are still in their shrinkwrap), but I will spend all day reading Wikipedia. There has to be something of value in an encyclopedia which speaks to people like me. - Connelly 20:04, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Hey, I would tend to agree. Academics by and large have a negative view of Wikipedia. Although I'll tell you two very brief stories from my University:

In the first, I'm in a seminar for discourse analysis, the lecturer hands out a handout and it is just a Wikipedia page printed out. He says "well, it's what you all do anyway".

In the second, I ask a professor for help with statistics, I go to see him and I notice he has a page open on one of the statistical tests I told him I was interested in. It is the Wikipedia page for Fleiss' kappa. I say, "oh, the Wikipedia page, I wrote that", "its probably wrong, see I don't know how to do the sums and I added an {{accuracy}} tag". He says "oh".

I wonder what his opinion is now. I mean clearly he had been using Wikipedia as a reference, will he continue using it now he knows that just anyone can write anything, even knowing it might be wrong? I might ask him if I see him again. At the least I think people should realise that Wikipedia is an excellent source of references and at most a largely reliable source of some information on almost anything. - FrancisTyers · 20:37, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Triple product rule

Hi. I would suggest you create its own article on Triple product rule rather than putting it as a section in partial derivative and linking to it from other places.

That would be more appropriate I think because it is not strictly about partial derivatives, it has things about implicit functions, product rule, thermodynamics, in it, and its presense in partial derivative (even at the bottom) looks kind of odd.

Also, a question. In the equality

what are the underscores after parentheses supposed to mean? That would need to be clarified, as well as maybe give a reference or two, if you are willing to fork it in its own article.

You can reply here, thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:07, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree...I was editing late last night, and when I woke this morning, I came to the same conclusion as you. Moved it to triple product rule. For the definition of the underscores, see the last sentence of the Notation section of Partial derivative. But I explained that briefly in the triple product rule article.

Thanks. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:23, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Kitschy (or whatever) ashtray

Hi, and sorry for not answering sooner: You posted your message at the top rather than the bottom of my talk page, so I failed to notice it for a couple of days.

A friend of mine bought the ashtray you are referring to at a garage sale in, of all places, Vienna, Austria. She has no idea where it comes from or how old it is. Not a smoker herself, she said she liked it because it was "cute" (or something along those lines). Austrians of course are not, and could not possibly be, sensitive to the kind of racism referred to in Talk:Kitsch as it is something to do with U.S. history only.

I'm afraid I cannot help by giving any details, but I do hope that by general consent we'll find a caption which is as precise as possible and one everyone can live with.

All the best, <KF> 23:28, 30 October 2006 (UTC)