I thought "stubs" are not "articles"? They're not in my sample.



I might have been a bit hyperbolic, Steve. After all, we know the article about National Fuel Gas is close to perfect, at least the last time I wrote it.



Mr. McBride, you know... this really and truly calls for a breaching experiment. Please, I beg of you, provide me privately with a random selection of just 10 of these 8,062 time bombs.

I just sent Mr. Kohs this list privately. I'm inclined to also post a list here. This site seems to be the easiest way to get biographies looked at and checked....

Feel free to post your results publicly, Mr. Kohs.

I'm sure that Greg is more than glad to "help" …


Jon

My actions will take place over the next 4 or 5 days.

My results will be announced at the end of March 2010.

McBride has some concerns about the potentially "nefarious" aspects of what I intend to do, but it is my hope that Wikipedia's problems can be fully exposed, even to the point of silliness, without unduly harming the reputation or well-being of any of these BLP subjects.

It is possible that one more editor will be brought in on the experiment. I am certain that come March 2010, my account(s) will be blocked for having done this breaching exercise, so it may be necessary over these next few days for me to ask for certain "far-flung" IP address holders to create (or awaken) some throw-away accounts, and actually inject the necessary edits on my behalf, as a proxy.

I'm certain this experiment will bear rich fruit and laughter one day.

By the way, my rough overview of these articles is that the vast majority of them are viewed only about 25 to 70 times per month. However, I did find one for a European entertainer who gets about 450 to 550 page views per month -- but still unsourced, still not watchlisted.

The arbitration committee is in a tizzy over this.

Roger's quite the little stormtrooper, isn't he?

MZ, I'd say your days in wikiland are numbered.

It's quite laughable.

The experiment will be completed by the second week of April, and the affected Wikipedia pages (merely 10 of them) will be entirely restored to their status as of approximately January 4, 2010.

It is amazing to me how fervent is the Cabalrb/Com desire to not allow Wikipedia to be exposed for the mess that it is. Besides, with the experiment already underway, what if it shows that for 90% of the cases, Wikipedia quickly repairs itself? I suppose that news would be trumpeted from the highest Signpost and McBride hailed a hero for having organized the demonstration of the powers of Wikipedia.

How's this for a suggestion -- just leave me and McBride alone, and trust in our ethics that we are not the types of people to unduly harm the reputations of innocent people, unlike some senior Wikipedians I know?

This is hilarious. It's rather like some journalist discovering that 14% of US nuclear warheads are totally unguarded. When he sends the gov a list and a note, they respond by calling him a traitor, and waffling on about abetting terrorism.

But not by doing anything about it, since all proposals for THAT, are stuck in committee. Besides, the fucked-up Executive Branch has a long-standing policy that ANYBODY CAN GUARD. Which would be weakened if it weren't applied everywhere, including to nukes. Don't you know.

Anyway, so let's find a way to blame Kohs and McBride for the stupidity and lassitude of Wikipedia.

And yeah, "inert" is the word. "Inert gas" might mean one thing to a chemist, but it's also an excellent term for what is emitted by Wikipedia administrators when their beliefs are challenged.

Pass more inert gas, Roger Davies! You gave us the helium squeal, now we want the xenon anaethesia!

Is that not exactly what you'd expect would happen in a situation like that?

That doesn't make it the "correct" response, but do you really mean to say you didn't see it coming?

No, history is full of instances where the government refuses to consult some guy is the world's obvious leading expert at doing some task, then having fits worrying about whether or not he is going to go consult for somebody else.

If you know the biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer or even Gerald Bull they make interesting reading.

There is Roger Davies on MZM Talk, behaving like an interrogator. Conduct unbecoming of an Arbitrator. Investigator, Prosecutor, Judge. Last one to wear so many hats was Raul654.

Fortunately, the only thing the little tyrants can do is to shoot Wikipedia in the foot.

Congratulations, MZM, though I do wonder how you deal with the sulfurous smell of these trolls sitting on your talk page.

That's not a reasonable parallel. Even a whole chapter in a textbook is usually much longer than a WP article.

My sense is that in many areas, article quality has declined. In others, it has improved. WP process is unreliable and highly inefficient. It could easily be better, but ... It would take structure. Horrors!

It could be surprisingly close to the original design, which was almost right. The devil, though, is in the details.

"Significant omissions" is a hard qualification, since essentially for any complex subject, it's a matter of taste.

However, I'd be interested in what you think of WP's basic coverage of physics and chem topics, like atom, chemical bond, isotope, radioactive decay, and so on. How about the wiki on science itself-- plenty of room to screw up there. Or chemical elements like hydrogen or planets like Jupiter.

Could be worse:

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/7/why_i...wer_who_exposed



Lazy asses: they should be conducting this research, not Kohs. Yet more evidence Davies, and the other JimboJuiceHeads, don't give a shit about the BLP victims. Shit, even according to their supreme leader, whatever Kohs and accomplices do will ultimately be on Kohs head -- a fact that Kohs is undoubtedly aware.

No, these fuckers are only afraid of proof the project is founded (in part) on a falsehood -- if not an outright lie.

The response to the NEWT project amply demonstrated that Wikipedia has absolutely no interest in any sort of meaningful quality assurance processes. Nobody likes QA (the role of QA, after all, is to go "YOU FUCKED UP" to people who have, in fact, fucked up), but at least most people have enough of a professional attitude about their work to understand that it matters that you do the job right. Wikipedia takes the cult of the amateur so far as to actively squash any attempt to behave professionally amongst its volunteers.

That's blatant nonsense.

Perhaps she meant overall quality assurance, i.e., something more systematic and formalized? I'd say what they have now is fairly effective for articles that are produced by established users, particularly those who are popular within the community - but largely ineffective for articles that just appear out of nowhere, with nobody around to advocate for them on an ongoing basis. In fact, I'd say that's true of wikis in general.

No, quite simply Wikipedia has no systematic quality assurance processes. It has a few processes that seek to identify quality work when it, by random chance, is found, but there's absolutely nothing in place to systematically enforce even minimal standards of quality, either in terms of content or in terms of customer service. Even the barest minimum of quality standards (keeping articles free from obvious vandalism) is managed by a random, unsupervised process . There is simply no systematic review process, and individual articles can easily be left unreviewed for years if nobody happens across one of them.

Yes. I'm afraid that so far as WMF goes, William Deming has lived in vain. What need is there for total quality management when you have a founder-lock on the market (thus no competition), live on donations, and your donors are not that picky with either their time or money? No business would survive this model (and, as a matter of fact, none of Jimbo's for-profits have). But WMF, as a monster parasite, not a mutualistic business-structure, is quite another matter.

Evolution is necessary for improvement of anything (organism to organization) but it doesn't work unless you close the feedback QC loop. Our favorite Weiner (Norbert) figured this out long ago, and this is the essential message of cybernetics as an idea. It's got nothing to do with the Borg and everything to do with measuring improvement objectively.

The real question of interest is how, without such feed-back quality control loop closure, WP manages to improve at all

My own answer to this is somewhat incredible, but see if you can do better: I think WP improves only through the efforts of a bunch of dedicated editors, who watch individual articles, and REMEMBER (I mean like, in their heads) which versions of which articles are pretty good. And which others of a very small group of other editors are to be trusted to edit. This info is not even written down, let alone kept track of, with anything so high-tech as a computerized spreadsheat. It's sort of like the mafia.

I know. The irony of this is razor sharp, but so far as I can tell, I don't overstate the case. Wikipedia is a moon rocket or aircraft carrier run by bunches of people who know each other's reps like an organized street gang, with no "books" (except when fighting breaks out). Think of NASA managed by Post-It notes and real time managers' memories which are not committed to paper. No CV's allowed. In most cases, no personnel files. And no master plans or blueprints-- the rockets under construction serve as their own blueprints, since they can be duplicated in any state at will, and stored in a monster warehouse of old prototypes.

Think what one could do with all this if it had even a ghost of a business or production model behind it! Alas, the people who run WMF do not come from the sphere of successful private entrepeneurs. They're rather like Obama's cabenet in that regard (most presidents in this century have had cabinets in which half of the people can from private business-- Obama runs 8%).

When you have a bunch of lawyers and former government employees trying to run a modern auto company (like GM) you get some hilarious moments. It all reminds you of King Canute and the tides. For Wikipedia, there isn't even the real-world feedback of car-sales. I have no idea what forces exist from "reality" to snap them back into some kind of contact with it. Maybe none.

I'd probably be inclined to agree with that assessment.

Alright, I've had a look at "atom" as its featured and thus presumably quite a good article. Here's what I have so far:

" In approximately 450 BCE, Democritus coined the term átomos (Greek: ἄτομος), which means "uncuttable" or "the smallest indivisible particle of matter"." Britannica places the year at about 430 BCE, a figure born out by the article Stocker, Arthur Frederick. "Atomic Theories Ancient and Modern." The Classical Journal. Volume 43, No. 7 (1948). Given that Democritus was born around 460 (this year is widely accepted, and appears in Wikipedia's own article) and given the supreme unlikeliness that Democritus coined the term at the age of 10, this is undoubtedly an error, and one that shouldn't have been too hard to catch. It is admittedly a rather minor error, but an error is an error.

There is also an important omission here, namely the significance of Epicurus who developed the theory of Democritus and Leucippus more fully, systemized it, and popularized it. As you say, determining what counts as a significant omission is a matter of taste, but the several accounts I've looked at all mention Epicurus.

The article also asserts " Although the Indian and Greek concepts of the atom were based purely on philosophy, modern science has retained the name coined by Democritus." Once again, this is wrong, and in more ways than one. In the first place, speaking of a Greek concept of the atom generally is misleading, as there were significant differences among the views of different Greeks (Johnson, Harold. "Three Ancient Meanings of Matter: Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle" Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. 28, No. 1 (1967)). More importantly, Democritus's concept was not based "purely on philosophy", instead Stocker writes that "it was a closely reasoned deduction from observed phenomena of nature" (Stocker 396). This view is borne out in a variety of other articles including Luthy, Christoph "The Fourfold Democritus on the Stage of Early Modern Science". Isis. Vol. 91, no. 3 (2000). As a matter of fact, Karl Marx even wrote on Greek Atomism and noted that Democritus was engaged in "an empirical search for positive knowledge of the world" (Bailey, Cyril. "Karl Marx on Greek Atomism". The Classical Quarterly. Vol. 22. No. 3/4. (1928)). Once again, we find an error that is small, but it is still an error, and certainly one that would not be made by a historian of science.

Corpusculanarianism is done poorly as well. To Boyle, and most of his contemporaries, corpuscularianism was a way of bringing together Cartesian and Atomist thought on matter and stands in opposition to Aristotelian views (a fact entirely and I would say significantly omitted, which is present in all the relevant literature, and is important to one's understanding). See Hall, Marie Boas. "Boyle's Method of Work: Promoting His Corpuscular Philosophy". Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. Vol 41, no 2. (1987).

There are also true errors in the paragraph on corpuscularaniasm. It attributes the theory to Geber, but recent scholarship has shown that the manuscript in question (Summa perfectionis) is "ascribed falsely to Jabir ibn Hayyan or Geber, and actually written by an occidental around the thirteenth century" (Newman, William. "The Alchemical Sources of Robert Boyle's Corpuscular Philosophy". Annals of Science. Vol. 53, No. 6. (1996)). It is possible that this is merely an error in Wikipedia's sources which it has reproduced, but I am not certain.

The article also misstates just what early corpusculaniasm asserted, stating its views as "all physical bodies possess an inner and outer layer of minute particles or corpuscles." In fact, the early view spoke only of metals, and is far more complex that what Wikipedia presents. THe statement "In this manner, for example, it was theorized that mercury could penetrate into metals and modify their inner structure" is plain wrong. Summa perfectionis argues that all metals are composed of sulphur and mercury. Mercury particles were believed to be "composed of uniformly tiny particles" allowing it to penetrate small gaps. Because all metals are composed of mercury and sulfur, the addition of more sulfur would change the composition of a metal. (Newman 571-572).

Finally, the statement that corpusculanarianism was "blended with alchemy by Boyle and Isaac Newton" is nonsensical. Corpusculanariasm, as found in Summa perfectionis, was developed by alchemists. Thus, it was inherently blended with alchemy.

So, for those of you keeping score at home. In the first three paragraph subsection of the "Atom" article there are at least 5 errors (mostly ones that are admittedly minor) and several significant omissions. If this demonstration alone is not satisfactory, I would be happy to continue going through the article.

As a matter of interest, have you never read a standard textbook on a subject in which you have some expertise and found errors? I have certainly have, many times, occasionally prompting me to contact the publisher, as in one case involving Academic Press, for a blatant copyright violation.

Sure I've seen errors in textbooks, but they are neither as serious nor as numerous as the errors of Wikipedia. In any case, your point is?

Please do. I suppose I knew subconsciously that this particular section was crap, overlarded as it has been by generations of editors who seem to want us to believe that their ancestors discovered or postulated "atoms" first.

It is indeed true that the Greek concept (at least that of SOME Greeks) was not based entirely on philosophy. Clearly there were little invisible particles coming off things and floating about directionally and gradient-wise, as anybody who has observed the diffusion of the odor of baking bread can tell you. You don't need to see these things; merely observe that they behave like diffusion of any substance that you CAN see. For that matter, the diffusion of things you can see (a soluble dye in water) behaves so much like the diffusive behavior of things that are manifestly (directly observably) particulate (particles of finely ground dye, say) that it's clear that the same thing is happening in other kinds of diffusion (smells, colored water), only at scales you can't see, with particles much smaller. Induction.

The Greek concept of "atom" evolved, but for some, was in SOME ways like what we today call a "molecule"-- it was the smallest division you could cut a thing into, before it lost its properties (at least those which emerge when the particles were recondensed, like steam). That you might be able to subdivide things farther than THAT (going into smaller bits which did NOT have the original's properties, here hydrogen and oxygen for water) seems not to have occured to the Greeks-- you have to go clear to Dalton (or in some ways, Newton) for it! And yet isn't it such a simple hypothesis? It could have been differentiated and discussed millennia before it was.

The article also isn't forceful enough that what we chemically call an "atom" today was pre-maturely named if we truly want it to stand for the indivisible (uncutable = a-tom) properties of the invisible particles of the Greeks. If we wanted to use the term literally, we'd reserve it for the various classes of elementary fermions (quarks, leptons) which we believe (at least presently) have no sub-structure. In that sense, it's not at all clear if Epicurus with his "atoms and the void" was really meaning to talk about chemical atoms, instead of about whatever the "elementary" particles are (elementary fermions, perhaps even guage bosons--- anything that isn't vacuum but can't be subdivided). Today we think that electrons are elementary, but we don't really know. How would one know when one has finally hit upon Greek a-toms?

Anyway, just quit the crappy history. It's a great example of the fact that we don't really know what the ancients meant half the time because we can't get into their minds, and our present concepts are different from theirs, but it's very hard to map one to the other. I suppose the same thing happens in trying to define Latin words for anything, not just objects. And on top of that, we hardly have any original Democratus texts and nothing of Leucippus so it's an even more difficult problem to try to figure out if the ancients meant one thing or another. The WP article atomism does a better job here, and probably should be used to summarize and purge the junky stuff from the history section of atom. How embarassing.

Okay, move on to the physics and chem! Please!

My point is that there are errors and omissions in any product of human endeavour, even those you choose not to criticise.

The value of sum(error*impact) , over all errors, is much, much, larger for Wikipedia than a typical textbook. That the value of this expression is non-zero for all "[products] of human endeavour" is, at best, a rhetorical distraction. You might as well make the "point" that the color of newly fallen snow is white.

Interesting assertion - as long as college professors continue to tell their students not to cite, or even use, Wikipedia in coursework, then people can at least hope that the textbook's impact is going to be greater for students in those courses, at least. Then again, maybe not... Obviously WP's impact on the reading public in general and society at large is now considerably greater, though one might also argue that the reading public in general has little or no interest in highly-specialized topics (which might traditionally be covered in textbooks) in the first place.

The last several posts in this thread have been pretty much off-topic, so maybe I should split it, but at the risk of making things worse, there really is a lot of corruption in the textbook business - the things have always been overpriced, but there's also a lot of glad-handing and sweetheart contracts and so on, people taking full advantage of the captive audience/market. I've heard stories that are genuinely shameful, though most of them predate the internet.

If the web forces textbook publishers to be a little more honest and fair with their customers, then that's a good thing, but if it forces them all out of business completely, that's a bad thing - that kind of market-level expertise isn't easy to come by, and there's little evidence that online course materials (which would presumably replace textbooks) are ever going to represent a real improvement, especially if suchmaterials are being altered while courses are actually taking place.

You're entitled to your opinion, of course.

Have any of those textbooks been published by a tax-advantaged non-profit "charity" that also allows its Founder Emeritus to skim some of the money (as a landlord) back to his for-profit commercial enterprise? Any of the textbooks have had content smoothed out about a subject, just prior to meeting the subject in a Washington, DC Doubletree Hotel suite for a night of fun?

That surely would have raised a stink in academic and publishing circles, alike, don't you think?

Anyway, thank you for inadvertently making our point for us, Malleus.

You might as well make the "point" that the color of newly fallen snow is white ... wait a minute!

I thought we were discussing content, not the circumstances in which it is produced. I agree that the vast majority of wikipedia articles are rubbish, and ought to be removed, including almost all of the BLPs, I simply disagree with the blanket assertion that they're all rubbish.

Until Wikipedia comes up with a systematic approach to ensure that readers are not forced to sort through rubbish themselves in order to find quality content, Wikipedia cannot claim to have any commitment to quality.

Note: the "featured article" process is inadequate for this purpose, because the "featured article" process is not systematic. Although if Wikipedia agreed to publish only its Featured Articles, that would be a significant step in the right direction.

The FA process is inadequate for that purpose because it fundamentally can't scale. That's why I've been so involved with the GA process, which I think is one of wikipedia's best hopes for significantly increasing its overall quality, at least to some minimum acceptable standard.

Do you have a plan to review every published article to ensure that it meets your "GA" standards? How will you ensure that, once every article is in compliance with those standards, they remain that way?

Until you can answer, at a minimum, those questions, you do not have a systematic approach to quality. You're just firing a quality blunderbuss into the crowd, hoping to hit a few targets now and then.

To ask the question is to miss the point. The real purpose of GA isn't to review every article, but instead to teach editors how to construct articles properly. Bit like a virus really, that will hopefully spread throughout the whole of wikipedia.

Nice in theory, but since it seems to be as much an arena for drama melees as anything else, it's just as likely to spread less constructive sorts of viruses*.

(* why does my spell checker prefer "viruses" over "viri"?)

Nothing is perfect, but sometimes anything is better than nothing. To quote Sam Johnson "Nothing will ever be attempted if all objections must first be overcome". In point of fact I think that GA is relatively "drama" free, and by-and-large works well.

Your answer indicates that you have missed the point. Until Wikipedia has some systematic method for reviewing every article, they cannot claim to have made any real commitment to quality.

FA and GA are both political exercises: mock battlefields in which combatants struggle for political supremacy to claim tokens of distinction. Reminds me of the "games" in Swift's Lilliput more than anything else.

Anyhow, a large and growing fraction of Wikipedia's editors have no interest in learning how to "write articles properly" (at least by your standards); their goal is to manipulate Wikipedia's content to forward their own agendas, and for them it doesn't matter if the article complies with your arbitrary GA or FA standards. They're not going to learn your lesson; they're simply not interested. How do you plan to deal with them?

Believe whatever you like, I'm simply telling you what I believe.

It's not my job to "deal with" anything, and they're not "my standards".

GA is better than nothing, on that I think we can probably all agree, but at the same time the one to two month (and in some areas 3+ months) backlog at GAN suggests that the process isn't scaling much better than FAC.

The real trouble with GA, in my opinion, is that it focuses attention on the wrong things. Frankly, who cares about MOS compliance? Who cares if an article follows the Guide to Layout? Too many GACs and FACs deteriorate into a discussion of the minutiae of these policies and hardly touch on the much more real issues of accuracy and completeness. It is, of course, much easier to check what kind of dashes are being used, if alt text is being used, etc. than to go through the hard business of checking footnotes and looking at sources, but that's the work that actually makes a difference.

Wikipedia's problem is that it's nobody's job to deal with such things. And limey's right: going over an article to ensure it meets with the Manual of Style and other such minutae does absolutely nothing to verify that it's factually accurate and well-referenced, which is the only measure of quality that really matters in the end. A well-decorated turd is still a turd, after all. So I guess y'all just aren't willing to do the heavy lifting that it takes to really write an encyclopedia.

Seems that the real problem with Wikipedia is that Wikipedians are all lazy fucks.

A significant reason for the delay has been the GA Sweeps project, reassesing over 2,500 old GAs to make sure they still meet the criteria. When that's finished no doubt the GAN backlog will start to reduce.

It's worth saying though that the queue length isn't uniform across all article types. Some are reviewed very quickly, whereas others can indeed languish because nobody can be bothered to look at them.

I think you may be confusing the GA and FA criteria. Alt text is a requirement for FA, not GA, and neither does GA demand full MoS compliance. I have rarely seen a GA review degenerate into a "discussion of the minutae", that's more generally the preserve of FAC.


Seems like you're just flinging shit around, and have lost the power of rational discourse. I shall leave you to your ranting.

Well, as for the delay issue, I'd have to respond yes and no. Certainly GA Sweeps exacerbates the problem, but it's not the only source (and you're right that some areas have a more significant backlog than others). If you look at the GAC page from a year ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations&oldid=263295361), you'll still notice a large number of sections backlogged over a month, although is general the backlog is somewhat less acute.

You're right that alt text isn't technically a requirement for GAC (my mistake), but I have seen quite a lot of GACs deteriorate into discussions of style details. The real problem, of course, is that a GA is no better than it's reviewer. If the reviewer just wants to talk about style issues, then that's all that gets brought up. This of course, leads into the general problem of quality control on Wikipedia. Quality control requires that knowledgeable people spend their time checking the work of others. In general, fact checking doesn't provide the fact checker with much satisfaction (there is a lot of satisfaction, at least for some people, in writing a really good article, but few if any people seem to really enjoy reviewing GACs and FACs). Thus, there is an acute shortage of people on Wikipedia who are willing to check articles, and an even greater shortage of people who are both willing and truly qualified. To do a thorough job, you also really need access to a major research library (thus the number of people who do a really good job checking articles approaches zero).

How do you remedy this? Well, I think part of the answer is to provide greater internal rewards for people who are very good reviewers, but that's a tricky business. I personally believe that the long term success or failure of the Wikipedia enterprise will depend on the ability to provide effective quality control, so perhaps more sophisticated solutions are in order. Maybe you have to pay someone to do quality control. This has a certain promise. Let the volunteers of Wikipedia keep writing as they do now, but pay fact checkers to verify and then protect particularly good, stable versions or something like that.

A halfway step would be to simply show the FA version (or any article grade version, if the article has been graded) as the default text that shows up when somebody searches for the topic on Wikipedia. There would be a little tab at the top, which would remind people that the "draft version being edited" had been suppressed for THIS article, because a graded one is available, and that to work on the draft version you must simply click HERE. Your changes will be saved on the draft. Any group willing to go completely through and re-grade the version (any draft version), can then promote it to SHOWN VERSION if they get agreement from two other people on the talk page. Perhaps we could make an exception for minor changes like spelling errors, for single administrators. That is, they could make MINOR changes in the TOP shown copy, directly. With a warning that anything not a clear error what anybody would agree with, should still go to the draft, till it's been looked at by a few people.

Yeah, I know it's a lot like flagged revisions. In fact, it sort of IS flagged revisions. Except it's turned off for all articles which no committee has officially graded yet, so you'd hardly notice it (at first).

I'll admit that finding this brought a smile to my face: Plural of virus.

That's pretty much how flagged revisions ought to work, with one exception. Administrators should have no special rights to decide what is or isn't displayed by default, as the only expertise they've demonstrated by and large is an ability to weasel their way through RfA.

For some subjects that may well be true, but remember that GA does not demand the "comprehensiveness" that FA does, and the vast majority of wikipedia articles are not hot research topics, on which information is only available in "major research libraries". Take Wife selling, for instance.

"However, the hydrogen-1 atom has no neutrons and a positive hydrogen ion has no electrons." If you're going to open the can of worms about the positive hydrogen ion, it seems that it would be appropriate to also mention things like alpha particles, but I'm not sure I would count this a "significant" omission.

"with a negative electrical charge and a size that is too small to be measured using available techniques." Untrue, and misleading. In Demelt, Hans "A Single Atomic Particle Forever Floating at Rest in Free Space: New Value for Electron Radius" (1988), for example, the electron's radius was measured through indirect techniques as less than 10^-20 cm. That was 20 years ago, and is actually mentioned, in a somehwat misleading way, in the Wikipedia article on the electron. There is also an omission here in that the concept of the classical electron radius is not mentioned. The whole issue of electron size, a basic literature review reveals, is a challenging one, and it should either not be mentioned or it should be discussed in enough depth to do the issue justice.


" Neutrons and protons have comparable dimensions—on the order of 2.5 × 10^−15 m—although the 'surface' of these particles is not sharply defined." Is downright meaningless in that is entirely unclear what it is referring to. What is on the order of 2.5*10^-15? It's generally accepted that the diameter of a proton is about 10^-15 (see, e.g., http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/YelenaMeskina.shtml ) but also that protons/neutrons do not have a radius as such (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/YelenaMeskina.shtml). The wording here makes it impossible to know just what is being claimed, but I feel confident in labeling this an error.

"The radius of a nucleus is approximately equal to [1.07*A^1/3] fm, where A is the total number of nucleons." is very wrong. The conventional formula is Rsub0 * A^1/3 (if anyone knows how to make subscripts and superscripts, please tell me), but the constant conventionally used is not 1.07, instead it decreases from around 1.3 for light nuclei to around 1.2 for heavier nuclei ("Improved Z^1/3 Law of Nuclear Charge Radius", see http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0253-6102/51/1/23) . Older studies put the value at 1.2 to 1.5, but have since been dismissed. I've managed to find a few references to a constant of 1.07 but they're quite old. More recent scholarship has also departed from the A^1/3 law (which is a weak estimate at best even after the constant is varied). Lei, Zhang, and Zeng find that the Z^1/3 law is substantially superior to the A^1/3 law. Either way, there is a fairly substantial error here.

"This is much smaller than the radius of the atom, which is on the order of 10^5 fm" Atomic radius varies by element. For smaller atoms, it is on the order of 10^4 fm, for larger ones it is on the order of 10^5 fm. Clearly, this is in error, and it would be easy enough to correct.

Anyway, I haven't the time nor the inclination to make my way through the whole article, but having reviewed the first four paragraphs, there are two clear errors (in the nuclear radius formula and with regard to the radius of the atom) as well as a problematic statement almost certainly in error, but rather ambiguous (with regard to the dimensions of protons and neutrons) and another seriously problematic statement with elements of both error and omission (with regard to the size of an electron). Finally, there's the omission when discussing hydrogen ions, but I'm willing to say that's more of a taste issue. On the whole, I'd say that the science isn't nearly as a bad as the history, but it's still full of flaws.







Even that article references a number of books not available in your average local library if you look through the bibliography. Indeed, any article worth reading will use as sources materials that you can't find in your local library. Those few articles that really can be written only with internet sources generally aren't worth reading (I'm looking at you videogame articles).

This.

Probably true. I actually had to buy one of them.