User:Nectarflowed



I'm doing graduate work in cognitive science in California. My username is from Ovid's Metamorphoses' description of the early days of humankind (pp. 5-7).

Principle of charity
In classical rhetoric, the principle of charity demands that when making an argument one assumes the most generous interpretation of one's opponent's statements, so that one's own argument is not derailed by simply claiming that the opponent's statements were misconstrued. This suggests that the most principled response to epithets is to ignore them, accepting at face value the user's claim to a narrow interpretation while again adopting more neutral terminology in one's own arguments (List of political epithets).

"Largest encyclopedia"
The english Wikipedia, at 1,200,000 articles, has 10 times the number of articles as the world's largest English language encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Britannica online (120,000 articles).

Usage
Alexa, the internet tracking site, ranks Wikipedia.org (all languages) in the top 50 on their internet traffic list. See, for example, this comparison between Wikipedia and the New York Times. In their tracking, the number of visitors to Wikipedia increased about 700% from July 2004 to July 2005.

"Wikipedia attracted 22.3 per cent of users searching for information about the Gaza Strip as Israeli troops closed down settlements and withdrew from the region. Wikipedia's market share numbers meant it drew five times more traffic than Google News, Yahoo News or the BBC and tied with CIA World Factbook for information on the strip." --"Wikipedia eclipses CIA", The Register. 7th September 2005

Nature published a study in December, 2005, that found a comparable error rate in Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica in scientific articles. The authors argue this "suggests such high-profile examples (like the Seigenthaler and Curry situations) are the exception rather than the rule."

Raul's first law:
 * "Much of Wikipedia's content, and all of the day to day functions are overseen by a small core of the most dedicated contributors. These users are the most valuable resource Wikipedia has.
 * "Corollary - Of these highly dedicated users who have left, the vast majority left as a result of trolls, vandals, and/or POV warriors - typically not as a result of any one particular user, but from the combined stress of dealing with many of them. Consequently, such problem users should be viewed as Wikipedia's biggest handicap."

"In the jargon of library and information science, lay readers [of Wikipedia] rely upon "secondary epistemic criteria," clues to the credibility of information when they do not have the expertise to judge the content." ("Anonymous Source Is Not the Same as Open Source," NY Times, 3/2006)

Contributions
Some of the articles I've started that I think are interesting include: Anti-racist mathematics, Kistler Prize, Ethnic nepotism, Decade of the Brain, Bruce Lahn, Noah Rosenberg, and Bernard Davis (and the "moralistic fallacy").

Created templates
I've created some templates that seemed useful:

1 (critics/proponents/etc.)

critics

2 RPA:

3 Summarystyle

4 Summarystyle-section

Wikipedia links

 * Edit counts
 * Modify signature.
 * Stable versions
 * Blank_maps - for creation of maps.
 * The Wiki Research Bibliography, meant to collect all scientific literature about Wikis. (Go to Resources -> List -> Publication year.)

History of humankind
Main article: History of the world
 * Circa 8000 BC - Agricultural Revolution /Neolithic Revolution - called the single most important change in the history of humanity
 * Circa 1550 AD - Scientific Revolution (ended 1700)- The birth of science as we know it
 * Circa 1700 AD - Industrial Revolution, Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1915), Green Revolution (1945)
 * Circa 1950 AD - Digital Revolution
 * Nanotechnology, genetic medicine, regenerative medicine (stem cells)


 * Copenhagen Consensus - a project seeking to establish the most economic priorities for advancing global welfare, using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics.

Science and philosophy

 * History of science
 * The Scientific method - essentially an extremely cautious means of building a supportable, evidenced understanding of our world
 * Naturalism (Philosophy) - rejects the validity of explanations or theories making use of entities inaccessible to natural science.  Compare with supernaturalism
 * Materialism (Philosophy) - the view that the only thing that can truly be said to 'exist' is matter; that fundamentally, all things are comprised of 'material'. Materialism is typically contrasted with dualism, idealism, and vitalism

Misc.

 * Flynn effect - the continued year-on-year rise of IQ test scores
 * Engineered negligible senescence - An engineered prevention or reversal of cellular aging, which is called senescence in biology. Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey believes it will eventually be possible to cure what he identifies as the seven causes of aging, which he defines as the "accumulated side effects from metabolism".
 * Chimera (biology) Occasionally, two human twin embryos join into one organism, resulting in a person composed of two different populations of cells which, in the case of fraternal twins, are genetically distinct.


 * Countries Ranked by Population to Nobel Prize Ratio
 * Graph: labor productivity in selected national economies - International Labour Organization (U.N.)
 * Graph: Annual hours worked in selected national economies - International Labour Organization (U.N.)


 * Cherry picking - selectively presenting evidence that supports one's position

