I don't think this is true In any event, since you (and other people who say the same thing) don't give examples, hard to evaluate yur claim in my work on over 100 articles, ahve seen very few , if any, cases where new people were really driven away - all of my rejected edits, each a child I felt sorrowful about, probably deserved, in the cold light of day, to be rejected. sure you are not just sour grapes ? or, one of the many wierd people who think that the earth is flat, or intelligent design is sicence, or whatever ?

most of the posts reflect a typical slashdot arrogance - we know computers, therefore the way we do things is better. I'm not gonna argue this fight, which is older and more bitter then vi/emacs, or even the unix haters handbook, but I will observe, for those interested in reality: Most of the people who use wiki are not computer people for most of these people, an MS word style editor will be easier to use , esp if it has good citation/ref features builtin, then current or any sort of HTML to put it another way, the 100million potential new wiki users would have to spend 10 hours each to get *comfortable* with html, when they already know word. so thats roughly 10^9 wasted hours. I speculate that the wikimedia team can make a good editor in 10^9 man hours - a lot less. case closed this is like slashdotters saying that the avg person should use linux because they can..configure the sector size on the hard drive. hard to argue with someone like that.

This reminds me of a story from www.thedailywtf.com New hire is shown the server room: redundant hardened servers, redundant RAID drives, redundant airconditioners, power supplies, phone lines to call people... Comes in a few weeks later, power went out, no airconditioning, servers are toast. why no phone call to the large number of people supposed ot get called ? no redundant power on the phones....... I mean, what kind of a moron has backup diesel in the BASEMENT !!!! ON AN ISLAND !!! Ok, no one thinks of everything. acid test, do they move the generators to high ground.....

before we can tell all those people along the jersey and CT shores, ya wanna live on the ocean, get your own darn flood insurance, we the taxpayers are tired of picking up the tab so you can have a great view ?

I'm reminded of the apocryphal IT support company that had a little test for new hires" the candidate was left in the waiting room with the "clueless" secretary, who would say, hey - are you here for the IT support posistion ? my printer isn't working. IF after many minutes of config type tests, you recommended partioning the drive and downloading linux, you failed If you crawled under the desk and figured out that the printer wasn't plugged into the wall, you passed as the engineers say, KISS

do what is best for your business starting a business is so much harder then you think, and the odds are so stacked against you, that anything you do that isn't 100% focused on getting the biz up and running will kill you. decide what software you need; do not waste 1 second on open source if it ain't right

that brings out the 12 year old popular scientist kid lurking in every geek ? This is like so far from practical clincial use. Its fun to speculate, but we should be clear, this is *specualtion* and it is many years, and tens, if not hundreds of millions to get an FDA approved device. PS: I may not be able to spell, but I have a PhD in molecular biology, and understand stuff like highly conserved initiation factors with hyper modified histidine (hypusine) residues, the role of shine dalgarno....

I have a PhD in molecular biology, and have worked on articles about DNA; in some very, very obscure techniques used to study DNA, I was, for a brief period, a world authority. I no longer contribute to wiki for two reasons: 1) I have to keep correcting, and recorrecting, and re re re correcting stuff; after a while, it gets tiresome to ahve to deal with people who think that RAM is part of the keyboard... 2) The copyleft allows *for profit* webpages to use my work. I find this intolerable; my hard work is used to make some loathsome 1%er rich? I don't mind if non profits do it, but I will be Dam*** if i contribute to something that can be ripped off by for profits. I would also add that the huge amount of work needed to write in markup as opposed to wysiwyg is also a deterrent; perhaps th next gen wiki will fix this and the copy left part

2,000 dollars, including 1st Class airfare and our lux 7 night hotel package, and hearing aids....

NO, he doesn't. He says, anything I Ron Paul agree with is constitutional, and anything I don't is not... I feel really sad that people are taken in by this guy eg, if Texas wants to enact a law saying gays and blacks have to sit at the back of the bus, thats OK with R Paul (although, come to think of it, that is Obama's posistion to; I wonder how many liberals praising Obama for being for gay marriage by state would praise obama if he saidn miscegenation laws should be left up to the states.)

cause that is the true question; science is $$, and, even more importantly, there are a limited number of talented people who can do science (I mean, how many guys can hit a major league fastball ?) I would say that spending a lot on cosmology is less important then cancer, but thats my bias

Before proposed change: The TSA is a broken agency, as every day thousands of Americans endure our broken security system...why isn't anyone in Washington working for the American people instead of the TSA bearuacracy ? After proposed change, first time someone gets a hangnail because of lax security Today, the TSA found itself under serious criticism from all sides, as it became clear that the lack of oversight by the agency has led to a hangnail on a passenger. Politicians in Washington are promsing hearings to look into this. Says Pundit Gasbag "it is clear that the TSA dropped the ball on this, and as a result, thousands of American lives are at risk every day"

A lot of people are posting things like, nothing in biology makes sense without evolution. I'll stipulate that, but does it matter ? Take cutting edge drug discovery, where you sequence a person's DNA, xray crystal structure the protein, etc You can do all that and be a King James is inerrant fundamentalist To put it another way, how often in real life does knowing evolution matter ? Or, how many people understand registers, or nor gates, yet manage to use a computer. I also wonder how many silly things the many people on slashdot , who seem to be overwhelmingly critical of TN, believe. We are all human; lighten up; let he who is without sin (no silly beliefs) cast the first blog-stone