Wikipedians have all kinds of credentials, which they are allowed to publicize if they want. Many Wikipedians have their full names and links to their personal websites, scholarly work, etc. on their user page.
There are also plenty of pseudonymous Wikipedians with credentials that they keep secret or vague. As long as they don't edit pages where they have an undisclosed conflict of interest, that's also fine.
Credentials can lend someone credibility in discussions. They just don't grant special editing privileges.
Linking to something from the wiki is considered irrelevant as it doesn't prove anything.
If an editor is an expert in a field and you can verify it it would be most useful to the encyclopedia to treat them as such. This is not actually a special privilege but how people normally do things.
I can gather citations and glue them into an article but someone with actual expertise knows which parts are important, what isn't and what is missing.
Wikimedia is of course free to have an encyclopedia project to entertain children with to much time on their hands but they will continue to lose good editors. You can't have both.
If you disarm the man before throwing him into the alligator pit he won't survive but it will be great for the alligators.
I don't understand your point. People who are experts in the field are treated as experts. They just don't get to unilaterally make all of the decisions.
Wikipedia doesn't consider itself to be a reliable source, for obvious reasons: that's directly circular.
But Wikipedia must always be cited if you use it, otherwise people reading your work (including Wikipedia authors and other scholars) cannot trace the provenance of the ideas you discuss.
Isn't this directly against WP:NOR, specifically WP:TERTIARY? Every fact must be supported by reliable first-party source, and the idea's provenance is that source.
In the research, there are often long paths that lead to the ideas: lunch room conversation -> paper 1 -> web search on term seen -> paper 2 -> web search on another term seen -> wikipedia page -> another wikipedia page -> original source (paper 3) -> paper 3's citation list -> paper 4 -> fact for your own paper
We always cite only the very last item in the chain, paper 4. I'd might cite other papers I've seen, but only if they are relevant. I was taught that the tertiary sources, like encyclopedias, are never to be cited, unless they have original facts which cannot be traced to other sources.
In my opinion, if you used Wikipedia, you should cite it. If you instead got your idea from "lunch room conversation", or a private email, or whatever, you can also cite that. It's a really huge problem that people pull ideas from Wikipedia, attribute them to something like "paper 4", but then it turns out that what Wikipedia said and what papers 3 and 4 said were not the same, and what Wikipedia said was actually based on some other paper 5 that turns out to be a bunch of bullshit, or a Wikipedia author made it up and wrongly attributed it to paper 3, or a Wikipedia author didn't understand paper 3 and made a total hash of it. Etc.
This of course also happens plenty when Wikipedia isn't involved, but for whatever reason people seem to have the mistaken idea that citing Wikipedia is inherently bad. There's no rule against citing Wikipedia, or tertiary sources in general, from professional work.
When a later person (e.g. a scholar or Wikipedia author) is trying to understand your work, it's incredibly helpful to know where some claim or idea came from. Otherwise they have to jump through extra hoops to trace the actual attributions and figure out where mistakes came from.
Wikipedia's original research policy is not relevant to what works you should cite in academic papers. A Wikipedia article is not supposed to contain the original research of its authors, because it's the wrong venue for such work, and because when such material is added it typically turns out to be nonsense or spam, but rejecting it on the grounds that it is unsourced is much easier.
> In my opinion, if you used Wikipedia, you should cite it [...] It's a really huge problem that people pull ideas from Wikipedia, attribute them to something like "paper 4"..
Your solution for using unreliable Wikipedia is to cite it. My solution (and the way I was taught) is to simply _never use it_ for stuff which goes into the paper.
If I wanted to claim something ("widgets are quux"), I might certainly _start_ with Wikipedia, just to make sure that my understanding is correct and that I am not wasting my time, but if I want to use this in the paper, I will need to move to primary sources, read them and ensure that there is a good evidence that widgets are indeed quux.
So now that I spent all that time reading primary sources, I'd certainly cite them and not Wikipedia - after all, primary sources are better, and a single citation is enough. And in the case the Wikipedia author was wrong, I will avoid a mistake.
By extension, if I am citing Wikipedia, this means I have not found/read any better sources, and that just shows that I am lazy or maybe those widgets are not quux at all. Any advisor/reviewer would immediately point to this mistake - "Why are you citing Wikipedia here? Find a better source or remove the claim"
And that's how the rule is made - it's not "Don't cite Wikipedia [put ideas unattributed instead]", it is actually "Don't cite Wikipedia [find a better source and cit it instead]".
(Although I agree that some lazy people do former rather than latter)
If you want to learn a mathematical topic, I would recommend reading textbooks instead. They are expressly designed for the purpose by experts on the topic.
I might suggest also trying to find online a syllabus for a course that taught that topic using that textbook. That can give you an idea of a reasonable pace to learn the material. If you can't find one using the same book, you still can get some idea of pacing based on the topics listed.
A good textbook will be designed so that you can move on when when you just have a decent understanding, and your understanding will deepen and complete as you gain experience from the material being used to help teach the new material in later chapters.
At the point where it is OK to move on most students feel like they are nowhere near ready. If you just move on when you feel ready it is easy to find yourself a few months later wondering why it has taken you several months to get to chapter 3 when you know that in college students finish the whole book in that amount of time, which taking several other classes.
It is OK if you go slower than the college classes. If you can't put in as much time per week as college students do you would be expected to go slower. Just use the college pace, adjusted for how much time you can put in, to help know when it is OK to move on so you don't get stuck due to thinking you aren't ready.
It can also help if you can find a list of assignments for a class that used the same book. That can give you an idea of a minimum number of exercises you should be doing. It is ok course OK to do more.
For many STEM subjects, MIT OpenCouseWare [1] is a good place to find syllabi and often much more for free.
Wow, a 15 kg bird with a 3 meter wingspan would be quite scary.
Apparently the availability of animals like moa, extinct flightess birds weighing hundreds of kilos with few or no other predators, put a lot of evolutionary pressure to grow big to fill the niche.
Apparently these birds evolved from relatively small eagles who accidentally ended up in New Zealand less than 2 million years ago, then evolved to a larger size faster than almost any known vertebrate, growing to be like 10x the size of their ancestors.
It seems once humans arrived in New Zealand around 700 years ago, the eagles relatively quickly disappeared.
In 2025 in the UK men age 45–64 had a suicide rate of about 24 per 100,000, which is the highest it has been in the past half century, and is higher than other age categories. In the mid 2000s, the rate was like 17 per 100,000.
From your link, in the USA the overall rate for men of the same age is about 30 per 100,000, but varies dramatically between states.
Pedantic aside: the word "fortuitous" means "happened completely by chance", which is the opposite of what you seem to be implying here. You probably want a word like "incredible" or "unlikely" instead.
> Many object to the use of fortuitous to mean simply “fortunate” and insist that it should be limited to its original sense of “accidental.” In modern standard use, however, fortuitous almost always carries the senses both of accident or chance and luck or fortune. It is infrequently used in its sense of “accidental” without the suggestion of good luck, and even less frequently in the sense “lucky” without at least a suggestion of accident or chance
"People object" because it's confusing to use the word 'fortuitous' (which means accidental) if 'fortunate' (which means lucky) is intended, unless the situation happens to also be accidental and the goal is to highlight the chance aspect. I wouldn't "insist" about this, unless working as a copyeditor, but many uses of the word "fortuitous" make it clear that the speaker/writer doesn't really know what the word means, and it often ends up sounding pretentious when people use "fancy" uncommon words incorrectly.
In any case, neither of these words is the right choice in the context of the previous comment. A word like "incredible" or "unlikely" or "amazing" would more clearly express the idea.
> Commissioner Anabell Brumford: Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to introduce a most special American. Tonight, he is being honoured for his 1000th drug-dealer killed.
> Lt. Frank Drebin: [to applause] Thank you. But, in all honesty, the last three I backed over with my car. Luckily, they turned out to be drug-dealers.
Here, "luckily" gives the dark implication that the police covered up Drebin's killing of three people by posthumously framing them as drug-dealers... and maybe the other 997 people as well. "Luckily" is nicely understated where "amazingly" would be too obvious, and "incredibly" doesn't work at all.
The epicycles model represents one arbitrary periodic function as the sum of multiple well understood periodic functions (uniform circular motion, i.e. complex exponentials). This is the same idea we use in a more systematic way today by way of the Fourier series, etc.
It's quite a good method for approximating any arbitrary smooth periodic function.
My best guess is that the originators of this model (perhaps as early as Hipparchus, but at any rate someone by the time of Ptolemy) didn't think there were literally circles being combined, but had a pretty clear idea that they were trying to make an approximate model to fit the data. A previous model, from Eudoxus, was also probably pretty accurate but more cumbersome to compute with, involving approximation of the visible planetary motion by the combination of uniform rotations of some imagined sphere(s) centered on the earth. (We don't know exactly because the books about it don't survive, so all we have are vague descriptions by other people.)
It's almost like the remarkable fact that many things turn out to be turing complete systems that you might not expect (that is, able to perform any operation that any other computer can perform, albiet more slowly). Board games, Chomsky's generative grammar, bacteria (in a sense). Natural languages, programming languages, odd combinations of logical operators.
Any number of things can serve as a basic vocabulary to postulate entities, and do so in a textured way that matches some parts of underlying physical reality.
It's tempting to look at this and make the tragic jump into anti-realism because of the interchangeability of so many forms of representation. But I think as long as you have a combination of pragmatic attitude, treat knowledge claims as provisional and converging on truth, there's a cash value to descriptions that makes them legitimately truth tracking regardless of how they're formed.
Gas leaf blowers are a menace to society that should not be allowed in any urban or suburban area. (If you want to use one on your farm or whatever, go for it.)
The ban is useless because the only way to enforce it is to catch it in the act (in my town). Basically impossible. So it is a ban that could be enforced (other ways) but instead is just a suggestion - and not one that most people follow because there are almost no repercussions.
There are some unavoidable sources of noise, so I'm not sure a blanket noise restriction is going to work. If someone is doing home renovation and the contractor needs to run a saw for a while, it's just going to be loud. Sometimes someone needs to jackhammer up a slab of concrete, or chip up tree pruning debris. Etc.
But gas leaf blowers are easily replaced by a much less neighbor-hostile alternative.
A month ago, I heard a lot of very loud jackhammer noises at 2AM. I got up and went out to investigate. A crew was jackhammering up the street. The foreman saw me and came by to apologize. The water main had broken and water was flooding the street. If they let it wait until morning, a lot of erosion damage would have been.
I told him I appreciate the crew coming out and fixing it right away.
This is not an accurate description. The first identified patients were people working in or living near a "wet market" where (among other things) various wild animals were sold. It's plausible that someone was infected somewhere else and the market was only the site of a "superspreader event" (rather than the earliest jump from some other animal to humans), but further details are speculative, informed by indirect phylogenetic evidence rather than direct forensic evidence.
It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.
It is very unlikely that the initial superspreader event of a pandemic would be in a wet market that would be the one place for an animal spillover.
And when you look at the documented lab release of SARS-CoV-1, it killed the researcher's mother. If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest to the researchers at the lab who were infected, and the places they visited. Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover. The fact that it happened in the same city as WIV is an unusual coincidence, but if the virus developed in rural Hubei, it was likely it would spillover in Wuhan.
Zoonotic spillover is not a spontaneous 0->100 event, there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
> If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest
thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
> Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
It didnt. There were early cases outside of the wet market.
> unusual coincidence
A novel coronavirus appearing outside a coronavirus gain-of-function research lab is not a coincidence. Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.
> there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
just because we are missing a link does not mean it doesn't exist. Christians use similar arguments to try and disprove evolution.
> thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
so you think a single person in the lab was infected (with no evidence), and then right as they were contagious, went straight to the wet market and on the way, infected not a single person related to the lab or degrees of separation from it? this is the case you are making?
> There were early cases outside of the wet market.
> just because we are missing a link does not mean it doesn't exist.
yes and no. in every other zoonosis, we have lineages and source animals and collateral infections. we have none of that for covid. its not definitive, but it is strongly dispositive.
> no there aren't
the article you linked is contradicting you, but regardless the claim isnt falsifiable:
"If Huanan Market was the source, why were “only” one- to two-thirds of early cases linked [...] why would one expect all cases [...] to be confined to one market?"
the article's thesis is that there are multiple cases not linked to Huanan market, but thats expected because of asymptomatic transmission. That argument could be used in favor of either side, so its not particularly meaningful.
> infected not a single person related to the lab or degrees of separation from it
as I just mentioned, the article you linked makes this very claim. you cant have it both ways.
> in every other zoonosis, we have lineages and source animals and collateral infections. we have none of that for covid
I'm ignorant but thought that the evidentiary record for ebola was also really thin? Where we have lineages and source animals, sometimes that has taken many years, I think?
I mean you need to show that trail Covid was very infectious even before it mutated more. It's been estimated to have a R-naught above 2. It seems incredulus that their is a hypotehtical lab worker who is infected who takes the train 7 miles to the wet market (distance from lab) infects no one, but than infects 1 person at the wet market. Than goes home on the train, infects no one afterwards after proving they have virulent infection. It seems to go against how virus work. Because they need to not only infect anyone after the ride home but also no infect anyone ever again execpt at the wet market. You need to show evidence of or you are just engaging in conspricy thinking
Also we don't have the Zoonosis of the plauge, or the spanish bird flu but we are very confident they came from animals because we can tell that. So that claim we always now is just dumb we are mising many origin animals for many diseases because can back generate dieasese lineages from the DNA of the disease sometimes we can't and I am sure there are some back traces that just go to the wrong animal.
China didn't help with the fact they killed and bleached every animal at that wet market but that is documented to have happened but that is not proof of lab leak.
-- There's so much heated speculation in this thread as to make all arguments worthless. What isn't speculation however, is that the international treaties against bio-weapons are a joke that can result in a global tragedy at any moment.
Bio-weapons are untraceable, one side can seed an infection in a way to frame another player, and all that could be done about it, would be heated but fruitless speculations. There's no point in arguing about "who's done it", actually that line of argument is a huge distraction causing a lot more harm than good.
Learn and argue about the dysfunctional internal and international bio-regulations, they are the reason for the uncertainty and lack of accountability which enable and invite truly global and truly disastrous villainy.
Yeah, it would have killed a friend or relative of the lab worker, or someone living in the same building as the lab worker, and then you would have your smoking gun of a lab leak.
Going from infecting a lab worker to a high-precision spillover in a wet market, without leaving a trace anywhere else, is just not how a viral infection is likely to work.
SARS-CoV-2 has relatively low IFR, especially among younger people, and a mild case is easily dismissed as a flu or cold. Transmission is also heterogeneous, with most patients infecting no one while a few infect huge clusters; R = 2 absolutely does not mean one patient infects two, who infect four, who infect eight, etc.
> An important feature in this distribution, consistent with earlier findings (4), is that the majority (76%) of infected cases shows no evidence of onward transmission amongst any of their contacts.
So there's no reason to expect that the first cluster that generates enough sickness and death to attract official attention will occur near the point of introduction. If we look at North America, then it in fact did not--the introduction must have been at an airport or seaport, but the first large clusters were in nursing homes, church choir practices, etc. This is different from SARS-1 or MERS, which were deadly enough to make that cryptic spread much less likely.
Can you clarify your point? Crowded, poorly-ventilated wet markets like the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market are quite different from American (or Chinese) supermarkets, and uncommon in the USA. American-style nursing homes are likewise uncommon in China, where it's more common for elderly parents to live with their children.
The conditions for a super-spreader event can arise in many different ways--before the contact tracers gave up, they found clusters in that wet market, those nursing homes, cruise ships, meat processors, migrant worker dormitories, and many other types of venues. I don't see why we'd ever expect the first cluster in the same type of venue in both countries, except by chance.
I think perhaps there is a correlation with population density as well. Wuhan is fairly dense, and the wet market that is subject to speculation is located in the most densely populated district of wuhan.
Is it possible that the animals at the wet market itself was the source? Sure. But it seems sort of coincidental to me it is also the most dense area of the city; could’ve already been spreading and this location just happened to be where a major outbreak occurred from density factors alone.
There was supposedly a "US intelligence report" which claimed that three workers at the lab went to a hospital for treatment for some kind of viral illness in November 2019, but it is not known what illness that was. According to journalists, within the US intelligence community opinions were mixed about possible viral origins, with some intelligence officials believing the lab had something to do with the origin of the virus while other intelligence officials considered that hypothesis implausible. There's not a lot of specific public detail about what information or analysis informed those opinions.
All sides of the question were heavily politicized. The Trump administration and the US GOP have heavily pushed a lab leak hypothesis and used it to argue against China and against scientists (e.g. turning Anthony Fauci into a bogeyman). On the other side, China has blocked investigations and tried to steer public statements by various organizations away from anything that would question their government's motives or competence.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
• ⬛⬛ The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
• ⬛⬛ Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
[...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. [...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.
China denies the claim that these lab workers were sick at all. Even if they're lying, there is no proof they fell sick with Covid-19 and there is strong evidence they did not. All workers at the lab were later tested for Sars-CoV-2 antibodies and came up negative. Unless that's also a lie.
The bioengineering origin is, according to the overwhelming consensus of virologists, not plausible scientifically. It also requires a large and airtight conspiracy involving a number of respected scientists. Conspiracy theories are possible, but never parsimonious.
If we're going in for conspiracies, you should consider that the US intelligence community has a proven track record of lying for political gain. The Iraq War was started by a conspiracy.
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