Comments on: Thanks, Web 2.0

By: Jason Scott

Jason Scott — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:10:26 +0000

Your question is addressed pretty well in this weblog entry I wrote a bit of time ago.

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 23:06:18 +0000

There is one flaw in your original essay which you never address; Wikipedia is a ridiculously large and comprehensive resource. To call the gigabytes upon gigabytes of raw html information on that site a “failure” is silly. The fact that the “on screen” content is not the best it could be is certainly true. This in no way negates the phenomenal success that Wikipedia has been as a starting point for academic, or recreational research.

By: cassiel

cassiel — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 17:50:56 +0000

… then my dictionary is wrong either =:-}

By: anonymous

anonymous — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 14:40:20 +0000

learn to take criticism

By: Michael Kohne

Michael Kohne — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:38:49 +0000

Actually, he did make a mistake (though almost anyone not looking to disagree understood what he meant and just went on to see if his underlying argument made sense).

In the US normal usage, virus and bacteria refer to different classes of germs. A virus is generally a small bit of genetic material that gets a cell to reproduce it, while a bacteria is a cell in it’s own right.

Antibiotics are effective against some bacteria, but not at all against a virus.

Not a big deal, as I said most folk got his meaning and went on. But yea, he was wrong.

By: cassiel

cassiel — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 13:43:42 +0000

About the virus “mistake”.

English is not my native language. In discussions about this speech I’ve been faced with this “argument” against it as well and despite the fact that it doesn’t matter anyway, but tells much about the lack of arguments of people, who are pro WP, my online dictionary http://www.leo.org told me that among even more meanings in English “virus” can mean all kind of pathogenic germ/etiologic agent/pathogen which includes bacteria. This is consistent with the latin origin of the word, which just means that it causes desease. In German the word “Virus” does not include bacteria.
So I doubt it was really a mistake because if you did use the word in its narrow sense, you would have had more in-depth knowledge about “superviruses” in hospitals and therefore difference difference between virus and bacteria and therefore probably known that antibiotics don’t work with virus. So I’m pretty sure you did not want to exclude bacteria. If not it really would have been a mistake.