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In my sophomore year of high school, my biology class was tasked with completing a month-long group research project in which we competed against each other. On one particular day, we had to distribute our research materials to other groups, and one group made the decision to cite a Wikipedia article. This caused a group member of mine to rush to inform the teacher of the mistake in hopes to gain a leg up in the competition. It is moments like this that remind me of how deeply ingrained an inherent distrust of Wikipedia as a source of information is; however, this distrust might be misplaced.

Wikipedia is marketed as an internet-sourced free encyclopedia with sister sites providing access to free media, free learning tools, free data and more, all funded under the Wikimedia Foundation. The goal of the site is to provide free knowledge to anyone who wants it.

This is accomplished via viewer donations and volunteers who contribute to writing the over six million articles currently available. The content of these articles is constricted by the organizations policy and guidelines, one of which is that all information in a Wikipedia article must be backed by another source that isnt a Wikipedia article. Editors and contributors work together to monitor content and ensure accuracy.

The Wikipedia family is meant to be supplemental tools to learning. Despite this, the source is commonly vilified by individuals, regardless of political ideology or educational background. Upon its conception, full campaigns were launched to ban Wikipedia, including failed legislation that attempted to ban it from public schools. However, since this first reaction, Wikipedia is gaining popularity in both academia and the public.

While Wikipedia itself is self-proclaimed to not be a reliable source alone, it clarifies that the site is meant to bolster understanding or kick start someones research. Despite this proclamation of reliability, conversation surrounding the topic has recently surfaced following its 20th anniversary this year.

In two separate content analyses conducted on Wikipedia content, it was compared in reliability to sources such as Britannica and other well-respected information providers. Educators at the University of Pittsburgh and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have promoted Wikipedia as a source of information not only for their students to use, but also contribute to, assigning their chemistry students to fill gaps in Wikipedia articles. Evidence also suggests that the scientific community is using Wikipedia as a method of reaching a more colloquial audience, outside of the context of paid-for academic journals.

Wikipedia is one of the most transparent sources available to the average person with self-publishing statistics on articles, editors, article traffic and more, complete with tables and figures to make it easily digestible. The course is also constantly campaigning to improve its level of information, relaunching its #1Lib1Ref campaign, calling on librarians to edit and add references to articles on the site.

While Wikipedia citations may not have a place in peer reviewed journals or submitted school papers, it is time that we stop shaming people for its use. Rather, it should be promoted as a great place to start your learning journey and spark natural curiosities. To expect everyone to have the time and means to engage in solely scholarly research is not only preposterous, but is also an innately classist mentality meant to gate-keep who is allowed to have a voice.

There is a fine line between expecting people to be well-read and making conversations inaccessible. Wikipedias contributions to the free knowledge movement and ever enduring push for self-improvement show it to find this line by making information acquisition and distribution accessible to all.

Link:
Reevaluating Wikipedia: A champion of the free knowledge movement - Chargerbulletin

Paul deLespinasse| Community Columnist

The Texas abortion ban cleverly obstructs legal challengers. The cleverness was needed becausethe statuteis clearly unconstitutional given the precedent ofRoe v. Wade.

The legislation denies Texas officials power to enforce it but authorizes private citizens to bring civil suits against anyone performing or contributing to an abortion. This blocks the way legislation is usually challenged before anyone is convicted for violating it.

Challengers usually sue the official who could enforce the law, but here there is no such official. Sinceanyprivate citizen could enforce this law, it is unclear who challengers could sue.

And successfully suing someone might notblock enforcement of the law.Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen, a lawyer,maintainsthata court could only grant an injunction against the particular private party who is the defendant in a lawsuit challenging the Texas statute. Anybody else could still sue abortion providers.

So why bother? You can't sue everybody.

Or can you?Perhaps Olsen didn't consider the possibility of a "class action"---"a type of lawsuit where one of the parties is a group of people who are represented collectively by a member or members of that group."(Wikipedia)

Wikipediaaddsthat:

"Although normally plaintiffs are the class, defendant class actions are also possible. For example, in 2005, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon was sued as part of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Portland. All parishioners of the Archdiocese's churches were cited as a defendant class."

The class of people to be sued here wascreatedby the Texas statute itself: the private citizens authorized to sue abortionists. A lawsuit challenging the Texas statute therefore merely needs to makeallof them a defendant class.

If a court granted an injunction it would bindallmembers of the class.No one would remain available to sue abortionists.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor's blistering dissent from the Supreme Court's 5-4refusal to enjoinenforcement of the law puts matters concisely:

"The Courts order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand. Last night, the Court silently acquiesced in a States enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents. Today, the Court belatedly explains that it declined to grant relief because of procedural complexities of the States own invention."

Of course the Texas legislation at most can only delay legal challenges, not prevent them. The minute an abortionist gets sued by a private citizen acting under the new statute, the case will be in court.

If the court rules against that doctor, its decision can be appealed to higher courts and end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. This could take several years.

But a lot of women who are denied their current constitutional rights would be irreparably harmed by the delay. "Justice delayed is justice denied."

The more cautious abortion opponents have avoided putting the issue squarely before the Supreme Court, fearing that some justices personally opposed to abortion might upholdRoeon grounds ofstare decisis the importance of stable rules people can rely on.

Instead, they have enacted increasingly severe procedural limits on abortion, seeking to nibbleRoeto death. But Texas has chosen to be "in your face" about it.

The Supreme Court thereforemay not be able to evade the basic issue forever. It might either have to overruleRoeor strike down the Texas statute. I predict the latter.

Texas is playing with constitutional fire.Itsapproach is one that conservatives could never support as a general rule. It could also be used to protectotherlegislation violating the Constitution, including laws prohibiting ownership or possession ofallguns.

Paul F.deLespinasseis professor emeritus of political science and computer science at Adrian College. He can be reached at pdeles@proaxis.com.

Go here to read the rest:
Paul deLespinasse: Abortion gambit: If Texas gets away with it, there goes the Second Amendment - HollandSentinel.com

In 1992, 11-year-old Guy Fraser spent his summer vacation fiddling with a radio. He was searching, sometimes in vain, for an English-language broadcast of the Olympics in Barcelona. He was trapped in France. Oblivious to the Olympics and her sons devotion to them Frasers mother had booked a two-week break that coincided almost perfectly with the Games. Fraser was heartbroken, but he made the best of it. He found French broadcasts he could mostly understand as he sussed out how his favourite athletes were faring in Spain.

Nearly three decades later, the Englishman is just as enthusiastic about the Games, especially after more than a year of Covid-19 lockdowns. So in the leadup to Tokyo, he began to do some research. Fraser is an equalopportunity viewer Once you properly understand the rules and tactics, any sport is inherently fascinating, he told the Guardian in an email and he wanted to be as informed as he could be. So he scrolled his phone from his home in Bath perusing rosters, trying to learn a thing or two about the people whod earned spots on teams across the world.

And sometimes, he failed. Sometimes he couldnt find any information at all.

I was surprised by the amount of people listed as competing who didnt have [a Wikipedia page] started yet, Fraser said. I assume the lack of competitions worldwide leading up to the Games meant that a few of the usual markers werent hit. He added: These are fabulous, fantastic athletes at their peak of capabilities and at the peak of human physical achievements, and they deserve recognition and representation.

Before this year, Fraser had dabbled in the wide world of Wikipedia. He believes wholeheartedly in the free online encyclopedia and its force as a social good, and from time to time hed edited or added a page. Now, though, he felt Wikipedia was seriously lacking and he had plenty of time on his hands. Fraser works with children who have autism, and the pandemic had disrupted his professional life and kept him confined to home. He was itching for something to do, and he found it in an internet blind spot. He was going to make sure every single Olympian got a Wikipedia page.

This summer, Fraser pored over pages of results everything from the decathlon to race walking to shot put. He translated text from foreign languages, read interviews, checked and double-checked his work. He doesnt like to code, so every time he finished a page, he flagged it for Wikipedia to finish the job. Since 1 June, he has created 358 pages. In that time, he has also made more than 1,300 edits.

He wrote about Ebba Tulu Chala, a Swedish marathoner who was born in Ethiopia and left as a child refugee, and Elija Godwin, a US runner who was impaled by a javelin in 2019. Then theres Alice Mason, a distance runner and doctor from New Zealand who paused her Olympic training during the pandemic to work at an urgent care centre, and Andrew Coscoran, an Irish middle-distance runner who was suspended from the Florida State college team for breaking curfew. Fraser doesnt discriminate between good deeds and bad. His goal is pure information, and the facts he knows about his athletes could fill a novella. Over the course of his research, he learned about photography and the Atlanta Falcons, Freibergs disease, the Republic of Kiribati, knee injuries, immigration and the optic nerve. If you have to trawl through a few Belarusian hammer throwers to find the great stories, Fraser said, so be it.

As he gathered information and parsed it into readable narratives, Fraser found himself pulling for people he researched. The more he knew about where theyd come from and what obstacles theyd faced, the more certain he became about their chances to win it all. Hes still waiting for one of his athletes to take gold.

When Fraser told his friends what he was working on, several were amused. His girlfriend is puzzled by the exercise, which ate up hours of his summer, but that doesnt faze him. At least Im being quiet, he says. Its as harmless a hobby as you get.

More than 10 million people across the world have registered to create and edit Wikipedia pages since the site went online in 2001. Exactly 199 of them have created more than 20,000 pages; the busiest creator had made 895,445 pages as of Thursday, way north of Frasers total. Still, he ranks in the top 1% of creators and hes done the bulk of his work this summer.

A week into the Games, Fraser is still plugging away with his pages on the English language version of the site. He has more to do hes not certain how many, exactly, but he wont rest until the 11,656 athletes are all enshrined in the online encyclopedia (he is helped by the fact that the vast majority of them already had pages). On Thursday, he watched BMX and learned that one of the Latvian competitors has also competed in bobsled events. On Friday, he turned his attention to track and field, working his way down the roster of entrants in the 100m dash. And hes not just creating pages; hes also making sure every runner who logs a personal best time gets an edit to document it. In the process, he discovered that Maggie Barrie, a sprinter from Sierra Leone, had been entered in the wrong race because of an administrative error. It was yet another story to file away, a page edit, on his way toward what, exactly? Recognition? Page views? The honour of creating a page for an underdog-turned-medallist?

Sign up for our Tokyo 2020 briefing with all the news, views and previews for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

But Fraser isnt concerned with any of that; he says he set out on this quest without a goal. There was no endpoint, because the concept of an ending is totally at odds with Wikipedia.

Theyre never finished, he says of his pages. You cant ever say all the information has been found. People will continue to build and improve and tweak and add. Its a great community; when you make a mistake, before you awake the next day someone youll never meet anonymously on the other side of the world fixes it. Its incredibly lifeaffirming and provides a bit of faith in humanity.

The rest is here:
There are 11,656 athletes at the Olympics. Guy Fraser wanted them all on Wikipedia - The Guardian

Heppenheim/Hamburg (DPA) Spectators and stargazers can expect fireworks: the stars falling by the hundreds on the Perseids Islands can be seen in the night sky in the first half of August.

And the conditions for the scene are good as long as the weather lasts all this summer, which so far has been fairly mixed. The conditions are particularly favorable this year, because the moon sets late in the evening, says the Association of Friends of the Stars in Germany. This means that its light will not illuminate the night sky and will not disturb the view of dying cosmic dust particles. Under optimal conditions, you could see a meteor rushing across the sky every minute or two.

According to Sternfreunde, the peak of the meteor stream is expected on the nights of August 12 and 13. If you then look east in a clear sky after midnight, you can see dozens of stars falling per hour. But even on the weekends before and after you can see the glowing particles.

The Perseids appear to come from the constellation of Perseus, but its the debris cloud from Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle that floods Earth every year in its orbit around the Sun. According to Astronomical Friends, the comet was independently discovered by Louis Swift and Horace Tuttle on July 19, 1862, and it takes about 133 years to complete one orbit around the Sun. The next time it should be visible from Earth is in the year 2126.

According to the Hamburg Planetarium, what burns up in Earths atmosphere are the crumbs of a comet that it loses in its orbit. Each August, Earth crosses this cosmic debris path, and comet particles fall into the atmosphere like raindrops on a car window. Then they burn up to 100 to 80 kilometers above the Earths surface. Some particles are bright enough to be seen even in the interfering light of large cities. However, the planetarium advises you to go to a dark place without disturbing the light and also to be patient. Falling stars will likely come in bursts, and the eyes will have to get used to the darkness of the night.

dpa-infocom, dpa: 210805-99-714652 / 2

Alcohol buff. Troublemaker. Introvert. Student. Social media lover. Web ninja. Bacon fan. Reader.

Read the rest here:
Science - Fireworks of the cosmic parts - Perseids burning in the sky - Wikipedia - The Weston Forum

My great-uncle Walter Scott worked for the Guardian as a foreign affairs subeditor from 1916 to his retirement in 1963 aged 88 (The changing art of the subeditor: You had to read the type upside down, 2 August). He was due to retire in 1939, just as war broke out, and younger men in the office enlisted.

A small team under the leadership of EA Montague vowed to continue printing and distributing the paper throughout the war, even if the country came under enemy occupation. On 9 July 1940, Walter received a memo saying that in the event of an invasion of Britain, he would be notified by a secret code. The message would read: Private and confidential, not for publication sortie 03.30 hours. If he received this, Walter was instructed to immediately notify all war correspondents around the world, as their lives would be endangered.

A particular friend of Walters was James Bone (London editor of the Manchester Guardian, 1912-45). He frequently invited Walter for weekends at his country cottage, Abbots Holt, in Tilford, Surrey. At his retirement dinner, Bone made a speech paying tribute to the people he worked with and said and the great Walter, who has carried so much of the London end on his shoulders. He has borne with me so patiently for so long and I fear I have not benefited as I should from his kindly admonitions. The last note from James to Walter, dated 6 September 1959, asks: [Do you] like the Guardians new name? Its the penalty that Manchester had to pay the world!

Walters services were needed as he was the go-to person for knowledge of foreign affairs. The management were concerned for his wellbeing and sent the following note: KAS [the office manager] says that he is quite content so long as we tell Walter Scott in writing that he has complete freedom to stay away in bad weather or whenever he feels slightly below par.

Walters command and memory of foreign affairs meant he was consulted long into his retirement; he was their Wikipedia.Anita ScottFarnham, Surrey

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Original post:
Walter Scott, the 88-year-old Guardian subeditor who was a walking Wikipedia - The Guardian