Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2019 March 27

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March 27

Chiselled into marble

Try chisellin' me, pal!

If Wikipedia is supposed to be the accumulation of the world’s knowledge in one place; it poses several questions which I would like answered.

1. Has there been any effort to close articles so that once a significant number of experts on the subject agree that all that can be said about the subject has been listed in the article that it is then closed for editing as the article is complete? Is there such a movement? I believe this would be useful for the following…

2. The electronic format is particularly fickle in my opinion and the internet etc will probably not last 10,000 years. Is there any movement to have the accumulated knowledge, and/or closed articles to be enshrined in a more durable format such as being chiselled into marble? What would the problem be with such an idea? Is this already underway? It would appear to me that Wikipedia is a prime opportunity to preserve such knowledge, a one-off chance for humanity, and a window which is quickly closing. I would appreciate any commentary on the subject. Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.131.40.58 (talk) 09:44, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

1. Many topics are subject to change over time, such as living people, current organizations, current physical locations, etc. And even those topics for which no change is likely, such as long dead people, there's still new research, etc., which may provide new info for the article. Thus there really aren't cases where "all that has been said about a subject has been listed". And, even if there was, good luck ever getting "experts" to agree on a final version.

2) Carving it in marble would take a huge amount of marble, space, time, and money. There is a way to download a snapshot of Wikipedia, but that does make an electronic copy. Making permanent copies of electronic data is a problem, and not just for Wikipedia. The best we can do currently seems to be to recopy the data each time a new format comes out. Any form of directly human readable data would have the same problems as marble. Microscopic preservation of data solves some of these problems, but creates others, like needing a microscope or other device to read it, and it being more subject to erosion over time. In any case you need to find a place to store it, like a sealed off dry cavern, where it will be safe for thousands of years.

As for whether the Internet will be around in 10,000 years, that depends on how you define it. If you mean the current format of web pages, then no, that's not likely to last. But if you mean people being interconnected with each other and with stored info, then yes, I'd expect some form of that to be around. Perhaps the sci-fi staple of a direct brain interface will be a reality then, with the answer to some technical question ("What's the composition of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter ?") coming automatically as soon as you think of it. SinisterLefty (talk) 10:31, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

• If you're thinking about 2), then Clock of the Long Now might be an interesting read for you, and Danny Hillis' efforts in just those directions. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:36, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for your valued answer but I fear the point may have been missed. The point would be to preserve the data in a hall of records type chamber. This does not mean it would need to be chiselled into marble, or that all articles would need to be complete but rather that the knowledge we currently have and stored in a central location is saved in a durable format which will last millennia. Much like the Pyramids etc. Is no one looking to do such a thing at all? If not, surely if a nuclear war or the like were to take place, all of our knowledge would disappear overnight? Something as common as how to produce and harness electricity or how to synthesise plastic, or create antibiotics or anaesthesia would just vanish. Someone other than me must have desire to see such a project launched?! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.131.40.58 (talk) 11:06, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes, the Long Now Foundation have been considering just such a long-term storage. Although the WP article only seems to cover the clock.

Marble isn't considered to be quite as long-lived as metals for this, and certainly doesn't offer the same storage density. See HD-Rosetta. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:17, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

Note that another potential problem is looting. That is, if it's location is known, and it's of any value, you could expect somebody to attempt to steal the marble slabs, or whatever material is used, much as the pyramids were looted (except for those whose location was unknown, such as King Tut's Tomb). But keeping such a place hidden also means it would be unavailable to those who want access to the info. Using materials of no value would help, if that's possible, but vandalism would still be a problem. SinisterLefty (talk) 11:48, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

Regarding nuclear warfare, see Packet switching#History. The latter concept covers the leading method of data transmission worldwide, which was developed in order to reduce the risk of the American computer network being destroyed by nuclear warfare. Nyttend (talk) 18:58, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

Sports trivia

having used the random article button recently it occurs to me that a vast number of articles are sports related. How many articles does wikipedia have and how many of these are sports related? Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.131.40.58 (talk) 10:08, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

For the total number of all articles on the English Wikipedia - see the top of the Main Page. Working out the total number of sports related articles is a bit trickier. You can try Wikipedia:WikiProject Sports and its various sub-projects, listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Culture/Sports and total the number of tagged articles. Alternatively you can use the appropriate categories and total those instead. Mikenorton (talk) 10:54, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

Press random article till you see 100 sports related articles. Divide 10,000 by the number of times you pressed random article to reach 100. That's about how many percent are sports.

I found 17 out of 100 random articles were sports related; that's 17% or about 1 in 6. That was ratio was fairly consistent in my count; it wasn't exactly every sixth article, but I did note in my counts that I had hit 6 sports articles in 36 tries, 9 at the 50 mark, and so on. I suspect that 100 is quite a small sample size, but the ballpark of "1 in 6" is probably not a bad guess. I didn't consciously count other topics, but my impression as they were flying by is that a similar proportion of articles were also about geographic locales of some sort. --Jayron32 15:23, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

I've heard similar complaints about train stations. And invertebrates. Some topics are just easier to collect the minimum number of good sources for. In comparison to other professions, athletes have a lot of things going in their favour when it comes to getting articles written. Their accomplishments are in the public record, they perform publicly so it's easy to get pictures, and they get lots of third-party press coverage for both their personal and professional lives. Even the least accomplished MLB player or driver or whatever will have many times the requisite number of references for them than, say, medieval poems or species of beetle. Matt Deres (talk) 18:21, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia may have an overabundance of pop culture, but it has plenty of other info. As regards the average beetle, as Babe Ruth would have said, "How many home runs did HE hit last year?" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:33, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

And someone has to actually write the article. In case anyone doesn't pay attention to mass culture, more people care about professional sports than history or science. My default response to anyone complaining about subject coverage is, "How many articles have you written, or paid to have written?" (If they've donated to the Wikimedia Foundation, the follow-up response is that little if any of that money goes towards writing articles.) --47.146.63.87 (talk) 00:31, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

Define "sports related". Is hide-and-seek sports related? Are you including mind sports? What about ball? Or bleachers? --Khajidha (talk) 14:05, 29 March 2019 (UTC) PS - just hit Random Article 50 times and found only 6 that seemed "sports related" to me. Roughly one in eight. --Khajidha (talk) 14:10, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

 Comment: We have 100s (1,000s?) of articles on random footballers, yet none on the scientist regarded as making one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century. —2606:A000:1126:28D:84A8:1E5E:5535:59A2 (talk) 04:14, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

We don't have an article on the scientist, but we do have a well-developed article on the site: Hell Creek Formation. It appears that DePalma's discoveries are breaking news, so it isn't very surprising that there's not an article on him yet.-gadfium 04:34, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

Indeed with no disrespect intended to DePalma, that above source itself says

Without his Ph.D., DePalma remains mostly invisible, awaiting the stamp of approval that signals the beginning of a serious research career. Several paleontologists I talked to had not heard of him.

It continues to give a quote from someone else I'm not including here for BLP reasons. While it's possible DePalma is notable, suffice to say "one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century" seems to be in strong dispute at the moment.

The media is of course prone to hype up stuff all the time. E.g. I'm sure some of us remember this [1], and we even had an article on that person at one time. Sometimes of course the people, the families or the institutions they work for contribute to this hype since it's seen in advantageous in numerous ways, but it can happen without that.

Ultimately for a lot of science matters, you need sufficient time to determine the significance of discoveries or research, one of the reasons most science related Nobel Prizes are only awarded many years after the whatever it is. I'd note even if this does turn out to be super significant, at a minimum the source supports the view it's not completely unexpected we didn't have an article since they were of relatively low notability (if notable) until recently.

Perhaps we should have an article sooner, but frankly our handling of late breaking news tends to be poor, and it generally gets worse when it's something easy to get wrong like science so it's probably a good thing we don't. The fact we do it with other stuff when we shouldn't isn't good, but the solution is to do it less not more.

Nil Einne (talk) 08:36, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

That's all well and good, but the point is, if you're an obscure sports person all you need to do is "appear" in one professional game, and you're "notable" enough for an article. —2606:A000:1126:28D:84A8:1E5E:5535:59A2 (talk) 15:13, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

My vote for the most pointless series of articles is Category:Bus routes in London. The whole lot needs to be merged into a single list. Alansplodge (talk) 15:51, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

Regarding sports, guess how many articles are in the search intitle:"2015 World Aquatics Championships". PrimeHunter (talk) 22:35, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

I do think our rules on notability for some sports areas are too lax. I'm especially concerned about the modern way that some subject specific guidelines including sports ones are taken as sufficient rather than simply a rebuttable presumption of notability which was IMO the former and correct norm. (Rebuttal requiring of course sufficient effort is made to find sources, based on where the coverage is expected. So for an obscure historic Congolese person would require a lot of effort in non online foreign language sources. And even for some modern sports people, possibly foreign language source searches including sometimes non online.)

But that's different from whether your original example is a good illustration for which I'm not convinced. While I can't and won't say much for BLP reasons, my read from the source you provided is that at least as of a few months ago, if you were able to convince experts in the field (by which I don't just mean paleontologists but those with sufficient specialist knowledge to be able to make a reasonable judgment) to come up with a list of the top 300 active paleontologists in the US, very few would have included the person you cited and it would have been the same anytime you did it at least prior to a few months ago.

The comparison with footballers is complicated but in reality in many countries anyone who plays professionally is often in the top 300 or at least top 1000 while they are playing. One key difference is that even the best footballers tend to have short careers, and others very short, hence someone may only play 1 or 2 games and only be reasonably in such a list for a very short time.

So such lists fluctuate a lot compared to paleontologists. This is one of the reasons why it's complicated for us to handle. An additional complication was mentioned above by someone else. Even if we go back to our GNG requirements, in reality we're going to have a lot more footballers than paleontologists since that's just what the world is like.

Nil Einne (talk) 03:50, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

The dinosaur guy's paper is encountering some skepticism from specialists who have seen it ahead of release (it is circulating under embargo). See the tweet streams linked from the bottom of this. The paper will be published on Monday and the guy is taking some heat for splashing all over the press before the paper is out. 67.164.113.165 (talk) 09:49, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Ah that's an interesting thing. When I skimmed through the source the other IP linked, I expected to be a fair amount of pushback to the claims in the scientific press in blogs and stuff. I didn't find it probably in part because I was looking in the wrong place (I don't know much about the field). Maybe also I was looking too soon.

But I also didn't realise that the paper supporting the claims being made hadn't been published yet which of course makes it a lot more difficult to critique. To be fair, the source the OP linked is actually for the April 8th edition of New Yorker so maybe the paper would have been published by then, but that doesn't really work in the modern world.

I should also clarify that I know very little about paleontology, so I'm not sure the size of the research field. I probably shouldn't have put numbers to my earlier comment. My main point was that my read of even the New Yorker source is that prior to this blowing up (and I assume it was known about at least a few weeks before the New Yorker article) I find it hard to say for sure that they were ever definitely widely seen as currently significant to the field of paleontology, as a professional footballer is to their field for the time they are a professional footballer. This doesn't in any way preclude this from happening, or having happened now.

So if you want an example of the problem of WP:systemic bias on Wikipedia, which definitely exists, it just doesn't seem the best example since the are surely better ones out there. I mean why not choose Donna Strickland? Yes it probably highlights a bias against female subjects in science (as with many areas) as well as a bias against science related subjects, but it still seems a better example.

Nil Einne (talk) 05:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)