Did England land a man on the moon? I had no idea. Typical of them not to boast about it. Jolly good, carry on.

Remind me to put a copy of <insert horrible title> on your book shelves next time you leave the door open. It's not a crime, but it is annoying.

I expect a bit better from Apple. After all, you pay a ton of cash for their hardware. It just shows that the corporate culture at Apple is moving further and further away from computing and more towards low cost media sales and commission on payments. Too bad, cause I really like OSX.

> in all my classes, students from Asian and African education systems beat my native born Americans. This has been the case ALL the time.

That might be (selection) bias. Asians and Africans that go the US, have received proper education, better than average. They're probably from relatively wealthy parents. The other Asians and Africans did not get such a good education. The Americans (although probably not natives!), on the other hand, are in your classes after receiving common education, and --unless you teach at an Ivy League university-- are not the best of their generation. So you might be comparing apples and oranges.

The eye is bigger than the stomach. That is certainly part of the MOOC "failure". However, I don't consider it a failure. They have hundreds of thousands of students that finished a course. Is that failure? In comparison to the 8 million enrollments perhaps, but in comparison to the zero that would have done the course without MOOC, it isn't. I did a course. Followed all classes, didn't bother to get a grade or certificate, because (a) I couldn't put in the effort in the single week there was to do the project, (b) I didn't care about the certificate. It was just to learn something new. And I'm grateful to coursera that they offered this possibility.

> The obvious poor quality elementary and post elementary pupils western countries produce compared to kids from the Asian subcontinent

I think you might be ever so slightly mistaken there. If you're referring to the PISA or OESO scores, they are heavily biased. And many Western countries have quite decent elementary education, thank you very much. I agree the effort could be improved, but you can't call it poor.

Yup. Reddit's admins cannot claim a moral ground for their decision if they leave all that shit untouched, and even (shadow)ban people that criticize you for it. I've deleted my reddit account. They can circlejerk themselves without me.

And the fact that APL evaluates from right to left. APL is QBASIC on LSD.

But wouldn't that create a "wiki" by professionals for professionals? It's hard to get a significant part of a research community to agree on a long, detailed text with loads of footnotes, so trying to write a concise entry on important topics like obesity, climate change, religious violence, etc., could result in similar endless battles of opinion, only this time between academic schools.

An ideal encyclopedia, IMO, can deal with such fights because the editor-in-chief is a bit of a Renaissance man (man in the sense of person, but the fixed expression is like this), with the authority, diplomatic skill, and good sense to make a final decision, and to reopen a "permanent" article when there is a real change. He/she will probably need a bit of equally minded staff to help with that.

As for other languages: many of the longer articles are factual and have the same relevance in all countries, especially when properly reviewed, so a translation would suffice. The rest, well, might not benefit from this approach, since it would cost quite a similar amount of money to support such a process for languages with a much smaller reach than the main, English wikipedia. Bad luck, I guess.

Yes, that is problematic. But I'm also not interested in contributing, even though my (former) field of 20+ years of academic expertise has a woefully sketchy article. I'm just not up for the endless reverts, the nitpicking, the minute changes. I once tried to start a wiki for a particular type of (computer-based) musicians. I added some skeleton, filled in some articles, inserted some relevant pictures. No-one read it, and one person rewrote a perfectly understandable paragraph into something worse, instead of writing in the vast uncovered space. So, Wikipedia seems to have painted itself in a corner. Editing encyclopedias is not for everyone.

> Yet they are the top search hit when someone Googles the name online.

If you think you've had it all, vanity rears its head. Wikipedia is these people's Echo. Perhaps that myth has a grain of truth in it.

I know women that can write very well. I also know women that can't. If they can achieve Wikipedia's goal, why not? Perhaps some typical men's issues would not be found on Wikipedia. But since the number of men and women participating is so incredibly large, it is unlikely the most significant topics get overlooked, regardless of the gender/ethnicity/nationality/etc. ratio.

I do mind that Wikipedia trumps itself on the large number of articles (like so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...), while in reality over 90% of Wikipedia's content is garbage. Here is a list of 10 random articles, obtained by hitting "random article" 10 times in a row, no editing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1...

Is that a pathetic list or what? Three football players, two geographical units of no interest with the shortest description possible, an article about a local school and a local museum, and an obscure artist. The only interesting items are possibly the glacier (but almost no information), and Oscar Romero. There are hundreds, if not thousands of entries in Wikipedia about characters in Star Trek and Star Wars.

Anyone who can clean up that mess is good for me.

That's fine, but nobody knows what the barrier is. If the barrier is time, how is Wikipedia going to remove that? The data there is, is of very limited value. It's all based on some badly organized, voluntary questionnaire. You can't make good analyses and decisions based on that. The rest of the article is socio-blabla, without as much as a shady questionnaire to back it up. If Wikipedia can't even organize its relations with the current volunteers without every argument ending in a fight, how is it ever going to attract women, who are apparently not deeply committed in the first place?

I don't get the "surely". I don't see how adding female editors (and all the other genders, of course) would improve wikipedia. More editors usually means more bickering. As far as I'm concerned, a much larger problem is that many of the editors have only limited knowledge of the topics, and quite a few have hidden agendas. What's next: the number of homosexual editors? Black editors (I can't write African-American, since Wikipedia is international)? Instead of focusing on PR problems, Wikipedia should focus on objectivity, correctness and completeness.

That example about categorization could also have been done by a woman. I mean, why put them in the category "American novelists", and not in "novelists"? Or "men"? Or "people who happen to write"? There are so many mistakes to make, and this one is, objectively, not even an error. Just a preference.

But that there are Wikipedia cliques is a problem of the people who edit, not of gender bias. I remember a vehement wiki-fight over removing information about female anti-feminists points of view.

While I can see the merit of action in classical gender gap examples, I too agree this goes to far. Imagine demanding a quotum on Pinterest: no more women allowed until the balance is 50-50. That would be insane. Now, I know that Wikipedia has a higher standing and is consulted as authoritative, so it will be deemed more important, but Wikipedia is about providing correct information, which is unrelated to gender distribution.

I don't get it either, unless it's about money, somehow.