Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2022 May 13

= May 13 =

Review of article
I have made a article named "Mothparja". It is a village. It exists on Google Maps with same name mentioned above. But except that I can't find it's coordinates to add them on Wikipedia. I don't have much references to add because it is a small village. I have a lot of information about it but not much references. So please help me to improve this article (Mothparja). — Preceding unsigned comment added by FAAHS (talk • contribs) 08:18, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * The English word "coordinates" means "latitude and longitude", which you have added. 89.240.119.222 (talk) 09:06, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

"We are the first" (Fermi Paradox)
Lex Fridman recently had Christopher E. Mason on as a guest. Mason is a proponent of the "we are the first" explanation for the Fermi Paradox, which over the last 15 years or so has become more popular.

My question for the ref desk is, how can this be? I was under the assumption that due to the timeline and evolution of the universe, the probability or likelihood that we are the first intelligent alien species is much lower than other explanations, as there has been enough time for other species to have come and gone.

To narrow the question, are the assumptions that we could be the first intelligent species in the universe on equal or greater footing with other explanations? And if so, what recent changes to our understanding of the universe have led to the more recent popularity of this explanation over others?

I should note, there was a YouTuber who attempted to answer this question a few years ago with detailed explanations for the supporting assumptions, including data and evidence from recent missions, but they seemed too arbitrary and haphazard when I first heard it. In other words, I wasn’t convinced by their argument. Am I missing something? Should this be the default assumption? Viriditas (talk) 09:32, 13 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Does that mean we are the first life, we are the first intelligent life, or we are the first life to explore space? The latter appears in the article under Extraterrestrial intelligence is rare or non-existent, and sounds reasonable to me. Space is very big, so we assume multiple instances of abiogenesis are likely, creating lots of opportunities for this unlikely thing, space exploration, to happen. Those are two opposed probabilities which we can't measure. Even if life is likely, we don't know how unlikely space exploration is. Card Zero  (talk) 09:54, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * It implies that we are the first intelligent life to arise in the universe. As I said above, this explanation has become more popular over the last 15 years.  There’s a YouTuber (whose name escapes me at the moment) who backs this up with selected assumptions based on our current understanding of the universe.  As I write this, I’m starting to see this is really a subset of the rare Earth hypothesis, which is apparently back in vogue. The YouTuber in question argued that this is because our latest observations support the idea that the conditions needed for life to arise are rarer that we used to think.  I have no idea if this is true. Viriditas (talk) 10:00, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * One of the problems of these assumptions is that the universe is so huge, and the number of planets likely to be so huge; just about any probability of any size that Earth could form the first time, it could form somewhere else. There's a small-but-possible probability that we are currently the only life of our level of "intelligence" within our own galaxy.  Given the number of galaxies in the visible universe, however, extending that to all of the visible universe is just not reasonable.  At those scales, the Law of truly large numbers becomes relevant.  It is also worth noting that the Fermi paradox was really only ever extended to our own galaxy; under our current understanding of the laws of physics and our technological ability for the near future, resolving signs of intelligent life is only barely possible at the scale of the Milky Way. Extending to other galaxies, it may not be possible to ever detect even the most advanced civilizations outside our own galaxy.  -- Jayron 32 12:45, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Good point. I should have limited this discussion just to intelligent life in our galaxy.  With that said, why do you think someone like Mason, who works closely with NASA, takes this position?  To me, it seems like another way of saying he’s a proponent of the rare Earth hypothesis, because they rely on the same assumptions.  So maybe I should rephrase my question for you:  how likely is the rare Earth hypothesis given all the other hypotheses? Viriditas (talk) 00:56, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
 * However if it is very improbable that life can arise, then Earth may be the only place. Say there is a 10−400 chance that the right molecules could form and be in the right place for a life form to arise on a planet, then Earth would be the only place in the observable universe. The problem is to get the information into the system. It could be extremely unlikely, or deliberate. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 08:19, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
 * The number of planets in the observable universe is huge, but irrelevant for this question. We only have to look in the more recent parts of our past lightcone. There are good reasons to assume abiogenesis couldn't happen too early in the universe's evolution. One needs enough metals to form earth-like planets and star formation rate has to drop low enough to prevent nearby supernovae from continuously sterilising those planets. Going from abiogenesis to a civilisation capable of communicating over interstellar distances takes some time too. Even with infinitely sensitive sensors and life being common, it may be hard to find any advanced life more a billion lightyears away, because we would be looking too far into the past. Still a huge volume, but much smaller than the visible universe. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:37, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * thanks for the insight. Speaking of early abiogenesis, what do you make of the evidence for the earliest known life forms in relation to this question? Doesn’t this imply, if you follow the argument back far enough, that "they" are in our past, not in our future, and therefore it is more likely we are the last, not the first? In other words, there has been enough time for life to have evolved countless times on countless worlds.  Zooming in a bit closer to home, life has had ample time and opportunity to evolve in our Solar System before ever evolving or arising on Earth.  And when you look at the earliest known life forms that we know of on Earth, it’s incredibly strange that they were on Earth so soon after the planet formed. There’s a far more advanced form of this line of argument that I read many years ago that I’m having trouble recalling, but if memory serves, we are already too far along the evolution of the galaxy for intelligent life to arise again given the length of time required.  I’m not saying we are alone at all, but I am saying that it is more likely that intelligent life arose before us and has already become extinct. At least according to this argument I heard some time ago given the age of the galaxy and our current place within the timeline.  More importantly, as a so-called intelligent species, we don’t have much time left, if you consider variations of the doomsday argument. Viriditas (talk) 08:46, 20 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Also relevant to the discussion is the idea of the Great Filter, the notion that while intelligent life similar to ours could be very common, but to reach the level of detectability by other intelligent life, such a civilization would need to cross some extremely difficult barrier that none yet has. -- Jayron 32 12:52, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * A more sophisticated form of the argument that we are likely not alone is based on an equation of the kind (1 − p&thinsp;E)H = 1 − p&thinsp;U, where p&thinsp;E is a very small but positive number while H is humungous, and the conclusion is that p&thinsp;U is very very close to 1. It is possible to give convincing lower bounds for H that are indeed truly humungous, but any lower bounds I've seen for p&thinsp;E have no solid scientific basis. If p&thinsp;E ~ 1/H, the argument falls flat. --Lambiam 15:11, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * It's very hard to say anything useful about this. We're basically extrapolating from a single observation that was unavoidable anyway because of the anthropic principle. No matter how unlikely intelligent life is, we must have at least one observation of it (ourselves), or would be unable to talk about it. We have no more observations, so statistically, the only thing we can say is that advanced life isn't extremely common. At least we can, since a decade or two, say that planets aren't rare. Even earth-like planets appear not very uncommon, but that's still a bit of an extrapolation. Maybe that's why the "we are the first"-explanation is getting more popular: the "earth-like planets are rare"-explanation no longer works. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:37, 16 May 2022 (UTC)
 * The Great Filter has other clear break points however. If another civilization of exactly equivalent technology to ourselves were on one of the nearby Earth-like planets, it is basically impossible to know that given our current levels of technology.  Our ability to detect an alien civilization currently presumes that civilization is of such an advanced level of development that they are doing the equivalent of screaming at us.  Right now, all we can do is whisper, and to presume that other civilizations are not also whispering merely because we can't hear them is a bridge too far to definitively say that we are "early".  We're knocking down some of the earlier barriers in the Great Filter argument, but there are still a LOT to go through before we can start deciding on our own uniqueness.  -- Jayron 32 12:42, 20 May 2022 (UTC)


 * See Radio_propagation. It's incredibly difficult to propagate radio waves over interstellar distances.  So unless you believe there are aliens above 2 on the Kardashev scale, being "alone" doesn't mean being the only civilization in the universe.  It just means being the only civilization in the ~20 light-year bubble that we could possibly communicate with across the vast emptiness of space.  --M @ r ē ino 19:38, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Proportion of Wikipedia articles primarily written by one person?
I saw, above, someone had written their own article, and it's primarily edited by them. Similarly, I have articles like that. And I was wondering if anyone knew what proportion of Wikipedia articles are just one person's "baby", like maybe that 1 person has written 75%+ of the content, for example? 2A00:23C8:4384:FB00:354E:690B:4FF5:390F (talk) 11:36, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Not sure how you would determine that, nor if we should see it as a good thing. I've created a few articles, so for a while they were 100% my own work, but fortunately other editors came along later and improved them. HiLo48 (talk) 11:45, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Per HiLo48, there is currently no way to extract that information. It may be technically possible to do a full database scrape, find how much of the current text of an article matches the text added by each person who edited that article, and figure out a percentage of current text that each person added, compile a list of those people and answer your question.  Given the absolutely huge size of the Wikipedia database, which is not just the text of Wikipedia per Size of Wikipedia, but also includes the full data of every edit ever made to any article ever, accounting for 5.6 TB of data.  The task is not likely to ever be done.  -- Jayron 32 12:38, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * There's this Wikimedia toolserver tool for finding contributors per-article. I guess one could hit the "random article" button a thousand times, and run the results through this tool, and call it a survey. Card Zero  (talk) 13:26, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I specialize in Greek Letter Organizations, and I think there are a few former members of the National Interfraternity Council and National Panhellenic Conference that I'm responsible for a great deal of the text. Also, difficult to figure out would be situations where a page has been created from another one when that page got too large. A *great* deal of text may be moved, and it would show up as being from one editor, when in fact many people contributed on the old page.Naraht (talk) 14:42, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I stand corrected. CardZero's utility does list the contributions of the current text by character count.  That means we would just have a means of getting the output of that tool for every article, and scraping the one particular statistic from each run of the tool, then collecting those articles for which there is 1 editor with >75% of the added characters.  Still daunting, but much more doable with the data readily available.  -- Jayron 32 14:48, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you everyone. I agree that it's not really ideal to have one article primarily written by one person because it can introduce bias, but when I used to seriously edit Wikipedia 10+ years ago I realised that some popular articles have overprotective admins, so I would just make or significantly expand articles on niche but noteworthy topics of interest... now 'my' articles are greatly changed since those days, however. Because it's not ideal for an article to be primarily authored by one person, it's more the reason to know the proportion that are. I'm sure a script could get the data for 1000 articles using that toolserver tool, but I neither know how to code and nor am I *that* interested. Just wondering. Thanks again 2A00:23C8:4384:FB00:543F:6BC8:2B87:AF4F (talk) 00:20, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Because it's not ideal for an article to be primarily authored by one person, it's more the reason to know the proportion that are. How weird to see this here, as I was just having this conversation offline. To answer your question, the proportion of articles authored by one person is extremely high, and gets even higher as the article goes through the improvement process going from a stub to a FA. I believe the Signpost or some other internal report published the actual metrics behind this some years ago.  This is also an example of how Wikipedia works in theory but not in practice.  In reality, close collaboration between writers and editors is extremely rare, particularly before the article enters the improvement process pipeline.  However, as it moves up the ladder, more collaboration is likely to occur in good faith, except in controversial topic areas where competing special interest editors tend to favor introducing bias over compromising for neutrality and article improvement.  A great example of this is the edit history of Thomas Jefferson.  Because no single author emerged as the dominant writer, multiple secondary editors arrived, each pushing disparate POV that failed to coalesce.  Instead of compromising towards a working version, each editor stubbornly fortified their position and refused to budge.  This is why the article remains B-Class to this day and is unable to move any higher in the improvement process. This is also why the first rule handed on down from those seeking to improve an article and its coverage is to avoid controversial subjects. Viriditas (talk) 01:04, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
 * There's also a tool called Who Wrote What which enables you to view contributors by hovering over the text of an article. --Viennese Waltz 11:17, 14 May 2022 (UTC)


 * I wonder what share of blame I'd get for Kanyakumari, in which I added no content but rearranged what was there already. —Tamfang (talk) 02:29, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

Warner Bros dvd complaint
How do I contact Warner Bros about a DVD in the UK? 81.152.221.235 (talk) 18:56, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Do you mean: you are in the UK and want to contact Warner Bros., or
 * you want to contact a representative of Warner Bros. who is in the UK, or
 * you want to contact Warner Bros. about a DVD that is or might be available in the UK?
 * Whichevers, the infobox in the linked article has their website linked at the bottom.
 * (That is, the link is at the bottom of the infobox, not that the infobox has a link to the website's bottom. Curse you, ambiguity!) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.208.88.97 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 22:18, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I mean: I want to contact Warner Bros. about DVDs that are available in the UK. 81.152.221.235 (talk) 18:16, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Does their website have a "contact us" option? --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:20, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
 * No. See for yourself. 81.152.221.235 (talk) 21:29, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
 * "If you still have a question after reading through our FAQs, please review our customer support forms and contacts: ... Home Video - DVD / Blu-ray Support: ". --Lambiam 07:24, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

Source of this image?
(https://www.winterson.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Titanic_in_dry_dock_c._1911__Getty_Images.jpg) What is the source of this image? I see it a lot and was thinking about it eventually being uploaded to an article. I am curious what the source is. Apparently, the image comes from Getty Images. This explains where it's being distributed, but not who took it or anything about it. RanDom 404 (talk) 19:37, 13 May 2022 (UTC)


 * RMS Olympic's propellers.jpg
 * Commons says it's RMS Olympic. (Seems the 1911 date gives it away as Olympic.) They've simply credited it to "Harland & Wolff Shipyard". Card Zero  (talk) 20:07, 13 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Well, it is very commonly misattributed. RanDom 404 (talk) 20:28, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
 * This one really is the Titanic, if that helps. Card Zero  (talk) 21:00, 13 May 2022 (UTC)