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User:Dranorter

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Hi, I don't know anything about user pages but wanted to note a few things about myself!

I am a computer science student at Central Michigan University trying to write a few articles on some history of computing stuff, we'll see if I get the time.

(I didn't yet, but I'm not doing nothing with my account. Just doing little things mostly, getting my bearings, hopefully not stepping on any toes...)

I think Wikipedia is really cool but while I was doing research for a term paper I hesitated to add my writing to it in fear of my professor concluding I had plagiarized from Wikipedia. I would have liked to have my own private Wikipedia for the purpose of note taking, but, didn't bother to make one.

See, the thing is I think a 'private Wikipedia' could be a pretty ideal bookmarking tool. And then, turned into a social bookmarking tool, it could allow people to compare research and ultimately greatly facilitate both the creation of Wikipedia pages and the efforts of those who wish to look further than Wikipedia.

But such speculation is just silliness.

Valete et bene scribite.


...

One of the reasons I'm attracted to Wikipedia is that it can be seen as sort of a definitive information source within certain limits. If you want to know something, you check Wikipedia, and if it's not there, you add it-- whatever it takes. However, as I read Wikipedia guidelines I begin to realise there are several ways in which this is simply not what it's for. First of all there is the 'within certain limits': there are some articles/facts which are simply not notable in the way Wikipedia requires. Secondly, 'whatever it takes' is not allowed: original research cannot be directly added to Wikipedia. It must go through a lengthy process of becoming general public knowledge which can be reliably cited.

Streamlining the process of making something into reliable public knowledge would help, but that's a funny idea. Widening the concept of notability would have consequences I don't fully understand. My understanding 1) of the actual Wikipedia and 2) of my ideal Wikipedia is not nuanced enough yet to have an opinion. Dranorter (talk) 19:42, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

The Senses

[edit]

There are about eight articles which attempt to give an overview of the senses.

There are some borderline cases:

For the most part these articles each have glaring flaws. I have been spending a bit of time trying to make sure they reflect the following ideas:

  • There are more than just 5 senses.
  • Our senses are very "multimodal", and we often don't consciously know which "sense" gave us certain information.
  • Vision is super complicated.
    • We don't actually know how many types of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (using melanopsin and other pigments) are in the eye or what they do.
    • We don't know what all the axons in the optic nerve are for. What types of information are they carrying?
    • Primary colors are a dumb idea.
      • The original study which established them failed to reproduce the full range of color.
      • "Red, green and blue" make poor summaries of the rods they're usually meant to refer to.
      • And as I said above, there are definitely other pigments involved in human vision, and we don't even know how many.
  • Perceptual abilities such as face perception require dedicated brain areas, so from that point of view are a separate sense.
  • There is some difference in sensorium from person to person, and from culture to culture. Not crazy postmodernist variation, but some.
  • Discussion of different animal sensoriums should be linking to stuff like:

Other ideas:

As for reducing the number of articles seemingly serving the same purpose, I have no particular opinion. Dranorter (talk) 05:16, 9 January 2017 (UTC)