4 ms·
It isn't a matter of keeping people happy. It's that 'facts' and 'truth' aren't as obvious and straightforward as people believe. Take something as innocuous a
by linearrust 2y ago
It isn't a matter of keeping people happy. It's that 'facts' and 'truth' aren't as obvious and straightforward as people believe.
Take something as innocuous as calculus. Who discovered it? British say newton did. The germans credit leibniz. What should the editors do? Flip a coin. Credit both? Credit neither since neither discovered the concept of 'the limit'.
It's like this but far worse for many topics.
Everything seems simple because we lived in our own national propaganda ecosystem. But with the internet, wikipedia must try to pick 'truths' out of many 'truths'.
- tim333 2y agoWell that one's quite easy. It currently has: >developed in the late 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently of each other But yeah other things are trickier. I follow the covid lab origin stuff and that's a bit of a mess.
- linearrust 2y ago> Well that one's quite easy. It currently has: My comment already addressed that: '... Credit both? Credit neither since neither discovered the concept of 'the limit'.' Neither newton nor leibniz discovered what we call calculus. If we are going to credit them for discovering calculus, we might as well credit the ancient greeks who developed similar 'calculus' and from whom both were 'inspired'. > But yeah other things are trickier. No. Even the simplest is tricky. As you just proved.
- breck 2y agoAgreed, but it's a technical problem that can be solved. We've started the solution with ScrollSets (https://breckyunits.com/scrollsets.html https://breckyunits.com/scrollsets.html), which power PLDB.io, among others. Orders of magnitude smaller than Wikipedia and Mediawiki, but the thing about compounding...