One thing that I’ve noted is that if you edit a group of related articles, even a large group, because it interests you and you know enough about it to know where to dig for good references, eventually someone will slap the “Single Purpose Account” label on you to sink your efforts.
It’s not a Wikipedia policy, it’s not even a guideline, it’s an essay. And yet the ARBCOM wields it like a hammer.
The politics on Wikipedia tends to favor the editors who are edit-factories: At least 40 edits a day on unconnected articles, spending only a few minutes, at most, on each edit. It takes all kinds, but when I spend hours trying to find good references for something, or get the text just so, that kind of editing makes me wonder exactly what am I looking at: Obsessed people with no life, a mostly-bot to generate noise to cover agenda edits, or what?
The bias against people who actually care about a topic hasn’t been good for Wikipedia.
[quote=“LutherBlisset, post:75, topic:95045”]It does not need to have a purpose. Evolution is not completely optimised, and certainly not purposeful. I admit, even I think it might be of use (maybe just under very specific circumstances), or have been of use. But even the latter does not necessarily need to be the case. A lack of selective pressure on this particular characteristic can be enough to keep it in the game.
Sorry, I needed to say this. Everyone, including scientists, tends to think in “What’s it for” terms. Its not a terrible question, but I think its not a really good one.[/quote]
I really disagree. I mean, very certainly not everything should be expected to have been selected for, and there are all sorts of “just-so explanations” that are unsupported if not entirely mistaken. But often you see the pendulum thrown to the opposite end and people just assuming traits might be non-functional without needing any reason to think so, just as a sort of null hypothesis, and that seems to be as much a mistake.
In this case we have an odd type of substance peculiar to a lineage, which like @L_Mariachi says they go out of their way to produce and even house in peculiar cells. There’s a reason we immediately ask what it does for them – that sort of thing should be easily degraded by mutations, so seems unlikely to persist without some sort of selective pressure maintaining it. It might certainly be secondary, a by-product of some other process, but that too is something you would want to investigate.
I mean, could you imagine the equivalent for vertebrates, finding we nearly all have cells full of this bright red iron-binding substance, and not wondering what value it might have to us? The whole field of chemical ecology would have been a non-starter if we were so incurious.
“What’s it for” is not an easy question, but I think of central importance – like Mayr, I would say biology is incomplete without it. It’s definitely a mistake to presume there must always be an answer in the form of some kind of adaptive purpose; sometimes the answer is “nothing, it seems to just be a historical accident”. But either type of answer should be based on some kind of evidence, and you won’t find that if you never ask.
Kindly do not tell me what I do and don’t mind, thanks ever so much
Irrelevant, as Wikipedia takes advantage of a search engine algorithm. Trump was the most mentioned presidential candidate throughout the primaries, does that make him a good president?
There was an article about the 9/11 memorial in Liberty State Park that didn’t mention at all the fact that the hideous monument was forced down our throats by the State, against the wished of all local govt. My edits explaining the controversy were deleted by some clown in DC. Eventually someone with more juice got it through.
Did you have the references to back it up? Wikipedia usually can’t deal with direct first person accounts, only after they’ve been compiled and published elsewhere as secondary sources.
I did, but I don’t remember why it was rejected. I only attempted one other unrelated edit, but the “editor” who deleted me was more helpful and told me what the problems were. I got that one through but was not tempted to do more.
I can say the deliberateness of the user unfriendliness was pretty obvious. Given the simple formatting it would not take a genius to make a “wizard” dialogue so you didn’t need coding knowledge to create one of these.
The deliberately shit user interface is what drove me off. I was already spending 80hrs/wk in the lab or classroom; no way in hell was I going to waste time jumping through arbitrary hoops in order to prove I was “worthy” of volunteering my expertise.
I don’t know enough about the case in question to disagree or agree on an informed basis. But in general, I think I have a problem assuming selective pressure needed to maintain a construct (and its physiological and anatomical results). I would think that quite a lot of constructs are neutral, in an evolutionary sense, as long as they are not selected against.
Basically, that’s what I tried to get across with my first post. But the discussion is rather interesting, I must say.
Fwiw two disgruntled Wikipedia editors wrote a rather long book about Wiki history.
They have tried to find a publisher and were ignored by the publishing world. They were told that Wikipedia “scares” publishers away from putting out an honest history of it. Jimbo Wales and his cult followers are famous for silencing critics by calling employers and such and backstabbing.
And just btw but non related: all the people who started Boing Boing have edited their own Wiki biographies. Mark Frauenfelder even created his own bio (he’s the editor “Ottomatik”) That’s against “the rules” but on Wikipedia it’s who you know, not who you are. Wikipedos love Cory Doctorow.
Funny you mention this. The Stack Overflow article on Wiki is constantly being fought-over. Look at the talkpage–people keep complaining that SO inside-types keep erasing the “Controversies” section.
I think that depends on a lot. A species can easily preserve neutral traits, but as enough time passes and it diversifies into a lineage, you would also have to worry about them getting disrupted by genetic drift.
For instance an animal that moves into a lightless cave doesn’t actually gain advantage from lacking sight. It might save a little energy on the machinery, but that’s a pretty fine optimization. Even so, mutations that interfere with sight are no longer so deleterious, so can now start accumulating in the gene pool. Various cave fish have lost eyes entirely, possibly at random, more likely because selection for stronger mouths has disrupted their developmental pathway.
So most Mexican tetras have eyes, but only because they use them, and the populations that don’t have none. Most of the genetic and developmental machinery is still there, but the intact feature is apparently too elaborate to last without a selective pressure maintaining it, even within this single species.
By the way, even if all tetras were extinct except those with just vestigial rudiments of eyes, you might still ask why they are there – as El put it, what they were for. That sort of question would be very hard to answer unless you can find a comparable animal whose eyes still worked. But how poor your understanding of their lineage would be if you just accepted them as superfluous traits, without even guessing that for most of their history these troglobionts were actually seeing their way around lit rivers.
Looking at the talk page, StackOverflow problems seem to be one of those “everyone knows” things that hasn’t yet made it over the threshold to where a reliable source, even The Register, writes about it. People adding the criticism are forced to string together blog posts about it, but blog posts can be problematic, and stringing them together into a conclusion is original research.
Newer editors keep trying add it, and don’t understand why experienced editors reject it, and the experienced editors get tired of explaining it. Each group starts to think the other is some kind of conspiracy. Someone should add some kind of “It’s just one of those things” box on the talk page explaining the issue in simple, neutral terms. Ha, not me.
