6 ms·

Wikenigma is an encyclopedia for topics with unknown answers

190 points by pranavnt 4y ago

blantonl 4y ago
So is this the equivalent of one of the stories in the 1997 movie "Good Will Hunting," but on the Internet for everyone to take a crack at some hard problems to solve?
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > to solve Just to be intrigued - see https://wikenigma.org.uk/curators_rationale https://wikenigma.org.uk/curators_rationale But also to raise awareness on the complementary part of the achievements in research. Nonetheless, in this regard it should be a much more structured effort than a "bedside booklet".
wgx 4y ago
Always a favourite of mine: we still don’t know how Paracetamol works. https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/medicine/drugs/paracetamol https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/medicine/drugs/paracetamol
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Yikes, 80k overdoses per year which can result in stomach lining damage? Are some medicines not worth the downside for society to have available?
  - raybb 4y ago
    The wiki doesn't cite a source that I see. But I looks like that may be recent misinformation https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2022/05/03/fact-check-tylenol-killing-at-least-100-000-people-per-year/9612891002/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      No, that bizarre 100K number is the misinformation, but Tylenol overdose is the leading cause of acute liver failure in the US, and accidentally kills 150 people a year (and another 400-500 people who intend to overdose.) The number of people who overdose without death is far more, and a potentially lethal dose is only about 3 times the effective dose.
- IgorPartola 4y ago
  Isn’t acetaminophen similar in that we also don’t know how exactly it works?
  - poofsoda 4y ago
    Paracetamol and acetaminophen are the same drug, so yes you are correct. America and Japan refer to the drug as acetaminophen, while most of the rest of the world calls it paracetamol.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  > Recent research suggests that Paracetamol does have a marginal effect for pain relief - but only in around 25% of individuals - and that its beneficial action in others is due to placeboeffects.
  - unosama 4y ago
    Typical pharmaceutical.
8bitsrule 4y ago
"Bandwidth exceeded". Latest at IA: https://web.archive.org/web/20220724100418/https://wikenigma.org.uk/start https://web.archive.org/web/20220724100418/https://wikenigma...
witheld 4y ago
It’s funny that the categories are pretty much everything. Concrete, crystallization, bicycle design, green tea. What do we know, exactly?
- djvdq 4y ago
  Y̶o̶u̶ We know nothing, J̶o̶n̶ ̶S̶n̶o̶w̶ witheld
rzzzwilson 4y ago
Doesn't look good: Resource Limit Is Reached The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.
- internetter 4y ago
  I think it's on a shoddy webserver and is already being hn'd. A refresh fixed it for me. Certainly not confidence inspiring but from the pages I visited it seems to be an excellent aggregator. Short summary, long enough for me to gadge if I want to head to Wikipedia. Thank god for that, was worried it was going to be another wiki that is essentially just an unmaintained Wikipedia fork slowly diverging away
  - jokowueu 4y ago
    How many users on HN are there that this keeps happening ? A few hundred in a few minutes is enough to take down a website? I've noticed that this keeps happening .
    - pc86 4y ago
      If you're on a $2/mo shared host I'm sure 50 visits in a short enough period is enough to toast the server for a bit. Front-page HN articles can result in tens of thousands of unique visits[0] and several hundred simultaneous users. It's not hard to see how 200-300 can throttle an otherwise unoptimized site. [0] https://medium.com/@ketacode/the-impact-of-appearing-on-hns-front-page-and-the-secret-of-getting-there-d38a4865eb1f https://medium.com/@ketacode/the-impact-of-appearing-on-hns-...
    - KronisLV 4y ago
      One of my blog articles got on the front page of HN a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185971 In total, I saw roughly around 27'000 views (that entire day, load varied, too lazy to figure out the peak RPS value), which meant just short of 8 GB of data being transferred and in my case over 500'000 files being requested (given all of the CSS files, images, JavaScript etc.). Now, the blog held out fine, because it was based on Grav, which means that it ends up being a bunch of flat files: https://getgrav.org/ https://getgrav.org/ It is especially interesting when you consider that I had capped the container that it was running in to 512M of RAM at max and also 0.75 CPU cores, just so it wouldn't slow down the entire node (can't really afford to have a separate server for it). So in essence, I think that static files can be served really well with limited resources, but once you throw complicated PHP apps (think WordPress), insufficient caching and also database access (especially with any sub-optimally written code) as well as perhaps even something like mod_php instead of fpm, things can indeed go wrong. I've seen enterprise projects struggle with 100 RPM due to exceedingly poorly written data fetching, N+1 problems and developers not knowing how to avoid running into issues like that or outright not caring because of the system being an internal one and the infrastructure having resources to waste. In my case, even the cheap 100 Mbps link was enough to serve all of the requests with minimal impact (i think the longest page load was up to 4 seconds at peak load, most others were lower, less than 2 seconds).
entwife 4y ago
A brief review of a single Wikenigma article suggests that it doesn't cover known topics particularly well. The mechanism for color vision in humans is poorly understood. We do know that there are four ocular photoreceptors, and at least one extraocular photosensitive cell in humans. The Wikenigma article erroneously states that "human eyes have three different types of retinal cells (cone cells) which respond to light". Of the several human photoreceptors, it is accurate that cone cells respond to light intensities at which we perceive color, but these are not the only human photoreceptors.
- kvathupo 4y ago
  It sucks to criticize, but I concur in the case of the site's article on neural networks [1]. They state that the successes of neural networks "defy mathematical understanding." Universal Approximation Theorem is sufficient; even if you give the benefit of the doubt that they refer to interpretability, there is active and fruitful research into NN saliency. (As an aside, I'm curious how such a quotation got published in PNAS?) It goes on to criticize NNs as not being biologically accurate, misunderstanding the purpose of NNs. Perhaps this is due to the site relying heavily upon newspaper articles, as opposed to actual research. [1] - https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/mathematics/neural_networks# https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/mathematics/neural_networks...
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    The stated aim being «to act as a Catalyst for Curiosity in a general sense – as well as trying to identify possible starting points for (re)cultivating interest in scientific, academic, and of course, armchair-based research [... also as] curiosity does tend to wane significantly as years go by», the ambition is not the most intent and practical. https://wikenigma.org.uk/curators_rationale https://wikenigma.org.uk/curators_rationale
josephcsible 4y ago
I noticed this on the page about infinity: > Are some infinities larger than others? But didn't Cantor prove the answer to that is "yes" back in the 19th century?
- tgv 4y ago
  AFAIK, he did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_first_set_theory_article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_first_set_theory_ar...
  - jwilk 4y ago
    The proof of the lemma in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_first_set_theory_article#Second_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_first_set_theory_ar... doesn't look right to me. They say "Since the endpoints of (a₁, b₁) are x₁ and x₂", but in the example below a₁ = x₅, b₁ = x₁₂. Am I missing something?
    - ComodoHacker 4y ago
      Corrected. 'Fast' wiki in action!
      - jwilk 4y ago
        Wait, what's corrected?
        ComodoHacker 4y ago
        I couldn't find the fragment you cited.
        jwilk 4y ago
        It's stil there.
- seanhunter 4y ago
kgeist 4y ago
When answers become known, do they delete the corresponding articles?
agucova 4y ago
While I found the concept interesting, having to request an account through a contact form just to edit an article [1] doesn't really live up to the “wiki” part. [1]: https://wikenigma.org.uk/info/notes_for_contributors/become https://wikenigma.org.uk/info/notes_for_contributors/become
- operator-name 4y ago
  In my mind there's nothing about locking editing behind account creation that would discount this in being a wiki.
  - teawrecks 4y ago
    Only because the wikimedia foundation isn't taking people to court over the trademark. But their original vision was/is a website that is freely editable by the audience.
    - quesera 4y ago
      Not sure what you're getting at. Wikimedia Foundation did not invent the word "wiki". They were not the first to apply the word to a collaboratively edited web page. And they do not assert rights to any words that would conflict with "Wikenigma". https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_trademarks https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_trademarks
    - Marazan 4y ago
      Wikimedia didn't invent wikis. In fact wikipedia has many festures that are completely against the ethos of the first wiki.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  Interestingly, "wiki" means (in Hawaiian) "fast" (used by Ward Cunningham in '95 for "very fast web"). So, no, the process may not be fast. But in topics like "the best competitive sports club in the world", some may prefer to keep intervention more controlled, depending on the general intention.
tgv 4y ago
There's a lot of work to do. * At least some of the articles in psychology and language have been written by someone with an agenda, or a limited education in the field. E.g., the article about turn taking (https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/language/general/conversation https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/language/general/conversati...) talks about "endogenous oscillators" as if it is accepted that that's the solution to the problem. * Philosophy mentions the Liar Paradox next to Free Will. These two are not quite the same. * The article on intelligence doesn't even try. "Further reading" refers to a 27 year old report that had to calm the seas after the publication of The Bell Curve. On the other hand, what's the point of listing everything in language, psychology and philosophy? We know next to nothing about these with any level of certainty. They could just be single entries. Now it seems as if the only thing unknown about language is the origin of the word abacadabra.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > unknown ... origin ? Serenus Sammonicus? Edit: ok, I read the page, I see what was meant. But a problem emerges, it could get evident seeing as their source is Wikipedia (?! "I know that because somebody told me"?!): it is epistemologically not trivial to state ignorance. Even when the learned does, the protocol is that "John, PhD, on that occasion expressed ignorance". It may be a reason why once upon a time we had erudition, much more highlighted than nowadays: some attempt towards completeness in the exploration of sources.
beardyw 4y ago
Irrational Numbers Not sure what I am supposed to get from that. Irrational numbers are just reals that aren't rationals. Why is this enigmatic? It's marked as Known Unknowns, but what is unknown? Virtually all numbers are irrational. Are numbers enigmatic?
- MrBlueIncognito 4y ago
  > It's marked as Known Unknowns, but what is unknown? The infinite digits of pi that we don't know. But we do know that they exist, so pi, or any other irrational number, will aptly be called a "known unknown." > Virtually all numbers are irrational. For every n irrational numbers you name, I can name n+1 rationals. There is no firm basis to the argument that there are somehow more irrational numbers than rational numbers.
  - tgv 4y ago
    Do you reject Cantor's proof then? That takes mathematical bollocks.
    - beardyw 4y ago
      Without wishing to defend it, the gotcha here is "numbers you name". Rational numbers are "named" by putting together a string of digits. That is not possible for the irrationals so the only ones we can name are a handful with alphabetic names. There are more sheep in a field than those. I think Cantor can rest peacefully.
      - ErikCorry 4y ago
        Extend alphabetical names to alphabetical descriptions and you have a countable number of irrationals. It's a bit suspicious that we can't name or describe any of the uncountable irrational numbers, isn't it? Not even a single example. Cantor's proof is not constructive. It doesn't name an example. If you enumerated all irrationals based on the algorithm required to calculate them then the contradiction in Cantor's diagonalization proof just turns into a failure to terminate. But that suggests that there are fewer irrationals than integers, not more.
vivegi 4y ago
Wouldn't a sub-wiki on Wikipedia for topics with unknown answers serve the purpose better? Interesting concept though.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Wikipedia already has articles covering unsolved problems for at least physics and presumably other fields too
  - vivegi 4y ago
    Yes. I was thinking in the lines of Karp's 21 NP-complete problems or Hilbert's problems. There is indeed a Lists of unsolved problems page in Wikipedia itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems). That is why the Wikenigma site in the original post sounded a bit redundant, though nothing wrong with a wiki focused on just that.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  If the site does a lot of curation and 'good writing' then I would say no, since wikipedia is a little austere. For example, if I want to read about oddball geographic places then Atlas Obscura is a much more interesting place to read.
davidy123 4y ago
They really should NOT make this look like wikipedia, even if it's similar in concept. Wikipedia (and its software, mediawiki) are three things: 1. content that is generated, 2. the community and culture and 3. a standard toolset. This site has very little in common with any of these, and especially the third point. The visual cue of the site's appearance indicates at least 3, but they aren't even using Mediawiki software.
- groffee 4y ago
  Mediawiki is some of the worst software ever developed, no sane person would use it. This site is using https://dokuwiki.org https://dokuwiki.org
  - davidy123 4y ago
    I don't love mediawiki software, starting with PHP, but it's indisputable that it is one of the most successful software platforms in the world, and it has quite an extensive ecosystem. But thank you for pointing out that it's docuwiki that is attempting to inappropriately ride the mediawiki coattails and muddling use. The fact this site is starting out without the basic feature of categories is a grave mistake. Maybe docuwiki edits them differently, but having clicky forms for every data field is also contrary to how wp became successful. Because it's not using mediawiki, it will not be any parallel in development to wp, which is also a grave starting mistake.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
bloqs 4y ago
Anecdata but I see so many projects on the Internet that are both British in origin or hosting and inspired to the point of plagiarism, often without acknowledging the components of the original idea. What gives?
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> Listing scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer. It feels a bit healthier to assume this is all of them, and even the ones that are "true" in some binary yes/no sense, may still have nuance to be discovered. One of the things I like about the original Wikipedia is that it's rarely so binary about things, often covering contemporary controversies and areas of current research.
zackmorris 4y ago
This is great! Many of my questions on Stack Overflow are unanswered, or answered by me months later. Maybe the unanswered questions could be used to create a scaffolding at Wikenigma: https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered https://physics.stackexchange.com/unanswered https://physics.stackexchange.com/unanswered ... Looks like Quora doesn't quite get it though: https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-find-unanswered-questions-on-Quora https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-find-unanswered-questions-o... I enjoy dabbling in fringe topics, and feel that the greatest danger to understanding is certitude. People get so certain that they know something that all further consideration of the topic ceases and they sit in satisfaction even when answers are contradictory or don't connect to greater understanding. Debating someone who uses circular logic feels like banging one's head against the wall. On a related note, we need a better framework for metaphysical discussion. I've noticed a huge increase in woo woo phenomena since the pandemic. It's probably just a change in my own attention. But since science and religion can't explain consciousness, I feel that there is more to reality and the mental models we use to understand it than is generally discussed. Wikenigma could use pages on synchronicity, manifestation, placebo, etc: https://www.wrf.org/complementary-therapies/power-of-mind-placebo https://www.wrf.org/complementary-therapies/power-of-mind-pl... “In a recent study of a new kind of chemotherapy, 30 percent of the individuals in the control group, the group given placebos, lost their hair.” For the placebo effect to be real, it would mean that the mind creates physical effects in the body. I take it further in my own life by believing that the mind creates the body and possibly the universe around it. Or at least, the mind/body/universe are somehow involved in co-creation. That's heretical to science, but, people experience it every day. So what the heck is that?
- mistermann 4y ago
  The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence. Nikola Tesla
throwaway743 4y ago
"Bandwidth limit exceeded" :(
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

190 points by pranavnt 4y ago

So is this the equivalent of one of the stories in the 1997 movie "Good Will Hunting," but on the Internet for everyone to take a crack at some hard problems to solve?

mdp2021 4y ago
> to solve Just to be intrigued - see https://wikenigma.org.uk/curators_rationale https://wikenigma.org.uk/curators_rationale But also to raise awareness on the complementary part of the achievements in research. Nonetheless, in this regard it should be a much more structured effort than a "bedside booklet".

wgx 4y ago

Always a favourite of mine: we still don’t know how Paracetamol works. https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/medicine/drugs/paracetamol https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/medicine/drugs/paracetamol

mensetmanusman 4y ago
Yikes, 80k overdoses per year which can result in stomach lining damage? Are some medicines not worth the downside for society to have available?
- raybb 4y ago
  The wiki doesn't cite a source that I see. But I looks like that may be recent misinformation https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2022/05/03/fact-check-tylenol-killing-at-least-100-000-people-per-year/9612891002/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    No, that bizarre 100K number is the misinformation, but Tylenol overdose is the leading cause of acute liver failure in the US, and accidentally kills 150 people a year (and another 400-500 people who intend to overdose.) The number of people who overdose without death is far more, and a potentially lethal dose is only about 3 times the effective dose.
IgorPartola 4y ago
Isn’t acetaminophen similar in that we also don’t know how exactly it works?
- poofsoda 4y ago
  Paracetamol and acetaminophen are the same drug, so yes you are correct. America and Japan refer to the drug as acetaminophen, while most of the rest of the world calls it paracetamol.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
> Recent research suggests that Paracetamol does have a marginal effect for pain relief - but only in around 25% of individuals - and that its beneficial action in others is due to placeboeffects.
- unosama 4y ago
  Typical pharmaceutical.

8bitsrule 4y ago

"Bandwidth exceeded". Latest at IA: https://web.archive.org/web/20220724100418/https://wikenigma.org.uk/start https://web.archive.org/web/20220724100418/https://wikenigma...

witheld 4y ago

It’s funny that the categories are pretty much everything. Concrete, crystallization, bicycle design, green tea. What do we know, exactly?

djvdq 4y ago
Y̶o̶u̶ We know nothing, J̶o̶n̶ ̶S̶n̶o̶w̶ witheld

rzzzwilson 4y ago

Doesn't look good: Resource Limit Is Reached The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.

internetter 4y ago
I think it's on a shoddy webserver and is already being hn'd. A refresh fixed it for me. Certainly not confidence inspiring but from the pages I visited it seems to be an excellent aggregator. Short summary, long enough for me to gadge if I want to head to Wikipedia. Thank god for that, was worried it was going to be another wiki that is essentially just an unmaintained Wikipedia fork slowly diverging away
- jokowueu 4y ago
  How many users on HN are there that this keeps happening ? A few hundred in a few minutes is enough to take down a website? I've noticed that this keeps happening .
  - pc86 4y ago
    If you're on a $2/mo shared host I'm sure 50 visits in a short enough period is enough to toast the server for a bit. Front-page HN articles can result in tens of thousands of unique visits[0] and several hundred simultaneous users. It's not hard to see how 200-300 can throttle an otherwise unoptimized site. [0] https://medium.com/@ketacode/the-impact-of-appearing-on-hns-front-page-and-the-secret-of-getting-there-d38a4865eb1f https://medium.com/@ketacode/the-impact-of-appearing-on-hns-...
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    One of my blog articles got on the front page of HN a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185971 In total, I saw roughly around 27'000 views (that entire day, load varied, too lazy to figure out the peak RPS value), which meant just short of 8 GB of data being transferred and in my case over 500'000 files being requested (given all of the CSS files, images, JavaScript etc.). Now, the blog held out fine, because it was based on Grav, which means that it ends up being a bunch of flat files: https://getgrav.org/ https://getgrav.org/ It is especially interesting when you consider that I had capped the container that it was running in to 512M of RAM at max and also 0.75 CPU cores, just so it wouldn't slow down the entire node (can't really afford to have a separate server for it). So in essence, I think that static files can be served really well with limited resources, but once you throw complicated PHP apps (think WordPress), insufficient caching and also database access (especially with any sub-optimally written code) as well as perhaps even something like mod_php instead of fpm, things can indeed go wrong. I've seen enterprise projects struggle with 100 RPM due to exceedingly poorly written data fetching, N+1 problems and developers not knowing how to avoid running into issues like that or outright not caring because of the system being an internal one and the infrastructure having resources to waste. In my case, even the cheap 100 Mbps link was enough to serve all of the requests with minimal impact (i think the longest page load was up to 4 seconds at peak load, most others were lower, less than 2 seconds).

entwife 4y ago

A brief review of a single Wikenigma article suggests that it doesn't cover known topics particularly well. The mechanism for color vision in humans is poorly understood. We do know that there are four ocular photoreceptors, and at least one extraocular photosensitive cell in humans. The Wikenigma article erroneously states that "human eyes have three different types of retinal cells (cone cells) which respond to light". Of the several human photoreceptors, it is accurate that cone cells respond to light intensities at which we perceive color, but these are not the only human photoreceptors.

kvathupo 4y ago
It sucks to criticize, but I concur in the case of the site's article on neural networks [1]. They state that the successes of neural networks "defy mathematical understanding." Universal Approximation Theorem is sufficient; even if you give the benefit of the doubt that they refer to interpretability, there is active and fruitful research into NN saliency. (As an aside, I'm curious how such a quotation got published in PNAS?) It goes on to criticize NNs as not being biologically accurate, misunderstanding the purpose of NNs. Perhaps this is due to the site relying heavily upon newspaper articles, as opposed to actual research. [1] - https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/mathematics/neural_networks# https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/mathematics/neural_networks...
- mdp2021 4y ago
  The stated aim being «to act as a Catalyst for Curiosity in a general sense – as well as trying to identify possible starting points for (re)cultivating interest in scientific, academic, and of course, armchair-based research [... also as] curiosity does tend to wane significantly as years go by», the ambition is not the most intent and practical. https://wikenigma.org.uk/curators_rationale https://wikenigma.org.uk/curators_rationale

josephcsible 4y ago

I noticed this on the page about infinity: > Are some infinities larger than others? But didn't Cantor prove the answer to that is "yes" back in the 19th century?

tgv 4y ago
AFAIK, he did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_first_set_theory_article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_first_set_theory_ar...
- jwilk 4y ago
  The proof of the lemma in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_first_set_theory_article#Second_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_first_set_theory_ar... doesn't look right to me. They say "Since the endpoints of (a₁, b₁) are x₁ and x₂", but in the example below a₁ = x₅, b₁ = x₁₂. Am I missing something?
  - ComodoHacker 4y ago
    Corrected. 'Fast' wiki in action!
    - jwilk 4y ago
      Wait, what's corrected?
      - ComodoHacker 4y ago
        I couldn't find the fragment you cited.
        jwilk 4y ago
        It's stil there.
seanhunter 4y ago

kgeist 4y ago

When answers become known, do they delete the corresponding articles?

agucova 4y ago

While I found the concept interesting, having to request an account through a contact form just to edit an article [1] doesn't really live up to the “wiki” part. [1]: https://wikenigma.org.uk/info/notes_for_contributors/become https://wikenigma.org.uk/info/notes_for_contributors/become

operator-name 4y ago
In my mind there's nothing about locking editing behind account creation that would discount this in being a wiki.
- teawrecks 4y ago
  Only because the wikimedia foundation isn't taking people to court over the trademark. But their original vision was/is a website that is freely editable by the audience.
  - quesera 4y ago
    Not sure what you're getting at. Wikimedia Foundation did not invent the word "wiki". They were not the first to apply the word to a collaboratively edited web page. And they do not assert rights to any words that would conflict with "Wikenigma". https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_trademarks https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_trademarks
  - Marazan 4y ago
    Wikimedia didn't invent wikis. In fact wikipedia has many festures that are completely against the ethos of the first wiki.
mdp2021 4y ago
Interestingly, "wiki" means (in Hawaiian) "fast" (used by Ward Cunningham in '95 for "very fast web"). So, no, the process may not be fast. But in topics like "the best competitive sports club in the world", some may prefer to keep intervention more controlled, depending on the general intention.

tgv 4y ago

There's a lot of work to do. * At least some of the articles in psychology and language have been written by someone with an agenda, or a limited education in the field. E.g., the article about turn taking (https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/language/general/conversation https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/language/general/conversati...) talks about "endogenous oscillators" as if it is accepted that that's the solution to the problem. * Philosophy mentions the Liar Paradox next to Free Will. These two are not quite the same. * The article on intelligence doesn't even try. "Further reading" refers to a 27 year old report that had to calm the seas after the publication of The Bell Curve. On the other hand, what's the point of listing everything in language, psychology and philosophy? We know next to nothing about these with any level of certainty. They could just be single entries. Now it seems as if the only thing unknown about language is the origin of the word abacadabra.

mdp2021 4y ago
> unknown ... origin ? Serenus Sammonicus? Edit: ok, I read the page, I see what was meant. But a problem emerges, it could get evident seeing as their source is Wikipedia (?! "I know that because somebody told me"?!): it is epistemologically not trivial to state ignorance. Even when the learned does, the protocol is that "John, PhD, on that occasion expressed ignorance". It may be a reason why once upon a time we had erudition, much more highlighted than nowadays: some attempt towards completeness in the exploration of sources.

beardyw 4y ago

Irrational Numbers Not sure what I am supposed to get from that. Irrational numbers are just reals that aren't rationals. Why is this enigmatic? It's marked as Known Unknowns, but what is unknown? Virtually all numbers are irrational. Are numbers enigmatic?

MrBlueIncognito 4y ago
> It's marked as Known Unknowns, but what is unknown? The infinite digits of pi that we don't know. But we do know that they exist, so pi, or any other irrational number, will aptly be called a "known unknown." > Virtually all numbers are irrational. For every n irrational numbers you name, I can name n+1 rationals. There is no firm basis to the argument that there are somehow more irrational numbers than rational numbers.
- tgv 4y ago
  Do you reject Cantor's proof then? That takes mathematical bollocks.
  - beardyw 4y ago
    Without wishing to defend it, the gotcha here is "numbers you name". Rational numbers are "named" by putting together a string of digits. That is not possible for the irrationals so the only ones we can name are a handful with alphabetic names. There are more sheep in a field than those. I think Cantor can rest peacefully.
    - ErikCorry 4y ago
      Extend alphabetical names to alphabetical descriptions and you have a countable number of irrationals. It's a bit suspicious that we can't name or describe any of the uncountable irrational numbers, isn't it? Not even a single example. Cantor's proof is not constructive. It doesn't name an example. If you enumerated all irrationals based on the algorithm required to calculate them then the contradiction in Cantor's diagonalization proof just turns into a failure to terminate. But that suggests that there are fewer irrationals than integers, not more.

vivegi 4y ago

Wouldn't a sub-wiki on Wikipedia for topics with unknown answers serve the purpose better? Interesting concept though.

mhh__ 4y ago
Wikipedia already has articles covering unsolved problems for at least physics and presumably other fields too
- vivegi 4y ago
  Yes. I was thinking in the lines of Karp's 21 NP-complete problems or Hilbert's problems. There is indeed a Lists of unsolved problems page in Wikipedia itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems). That is why the Wikenigma site in the original post sounded a bit redundant, though nothing wrong with a wiki focused on just that.
jabroni_salad 4y ago
If the site does a lot of curation and 'good writing' then I would say no, since wikipedia is a little austere. For example, if I want to read about oddball geographic places then Atlas Obscura is a much more interesting place to read.

davidy123 4y ago

They really should NOT make this look like wikipedia, even if it's similar in concept. Wikipedia (and its software, mediawiki) are three things: 1. content that is generated, 2. the community and culture and 3. a standard toolset. This site has very little in common with any of these, and especially the third point. The visual cue of the site's appearance indicates at least 3, but they aren't even using Mediawiki software.

groffee 4y ago
Mediawiki is some of the worst software ever developed, no sane person would use it. This site is using https://dokuwiki.org https://dokuwiki.org
- davidy123 4y ago
  I don't love mediawiki software, starting with PHP, but it's indisputable that it is one of the most successful software platforms in the world, and it has quite an extensive ecosystem. But thank you for pointing out that it's docuwiki that is attempting to inappropriately ride the mediawiki coattails and muddling use. The fact this site is starting out without the basic feature of categories is a grave mistake. Maybe docuwiki edits them differently, but having clicky forms for every data field is also contrary to how wp became successful. Because it's not using mediawiki, it will not be any parallel in development to wp, which is also a grave starting mistake.
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bloqs 4y ago

Anecdata but I see so many projects on the Internet that are both British in origin or hosting and inspired to the point of plagiarism, often without acknowledging the components of the original idea. What gives?

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

> Listing scientific and academic questions to which no-one, anywhere, has yet been able to provide a definitive answer. It feels a bit healthier to assume this is all of them, and even the ones that are "true" in some binary yes/no sense, may still have nuance to be discovered. One of the things I like about the original Wikipedia is that it's rarely so binary about things, often covering contemporary controversies and areas of current research.

zackmorris 4y ago

This is great! Many of my questions on Stack Overflow are unanswered, or answered by me months later. Maybe the unanswered questions could be used to create a scaffolding at Wikenigma: https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered https://physics.stackexchange.com/unanswered https://physics.stackexchange.com/unanswered ... Looks like Quora doesn't quite get it though: https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-find-unanswered-questions-on-Quora https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-find-unanswered-questions-o... I enjoy dabbling in fringe topics, and feel that the greatest danger to understanding is certitude. People get so certain that they know something that all further consideration of the topic ceases and they sit in satisfaction even when answers are contradictory or don't connect to greater understanding. Debating someone who uses circular logic feels like banging one's head against the wall. On a related note, we need a better framework for metaphysical discussion. I've noticed a huge increase in woo woo phenomena since the pandemic. It's probably just a change in my own attention. But since science and religion can't explain consciousness, I feel that there is more to reality and the mental models we use to understand it than is generally discussed. Wikenigma could use pages on synchronicity, manifestation, placebo, etc: https://www.wrf.org/complementary-therapies/power-of-mind-placebo https://www.wrf.org/complementary-therapies/power-of-mind-pl... “In a recent study of a new kind of chemotherapy, 30 percent of the individuals in the control group, the group given placebos, lost their hair.” For the placebo effect to be real, it would mean that the mind creates physical effects in the body. I take it further in my own life by believing that the mind creates the body and possibly the universe around it. Or at least, the mind/body/universe are somehow involved in co-creation. That's heretical to science, but, people experience it every day. So what the heck is that?

mistermann 4y ago
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence. Nikola Tesla

throwaway743 4y ago

"Bandwidth limit exceeded" :(

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