Wikipedia seems like an outstanding idea - anyone can edit a page etc. - but this has obvious disadvantages: vandals seem to be prowling around almost everywhere. Even if you find a sufficiently obscure or technical article to edit, the chances are that there is someone out there who will probably either engage in an edit war or just vandalise the article for the fun of it. Other people to watch out for are those who try to promote their own (unofficial) ideas in insidious and devious ways (for example, by slipping in a few sly links at the bottom of articles which many people overlook). Also, it's good to be aware of reading someone's comments that may initially seem offensive, but their intention is just to help out (especially those whose first language is not English). It's very easy to fall into the trap of 'snapping' back at someone. With wikipedia, patience is the name of the game: it's in the nature of WP that good articles are created by lengthy discussions (over many moons) and these discussions are worthwhile in the long run - if anything, you will always learn something useful at WP - it is an encyclopedia after all ! Also, you may make 'edit friends' here. I have !
My main aims at Wikipedia...
I am mainly interested in contributing to the following categories:
Planck's relation between the energy and frequency of a photon can be derived using special relativity. Does this mean that light quantization is implicit in special relativity ?
Is telekinesis a real phenomena and can current theories of physics account for it ?
At what point does a piece of matter become living ? Do current theories give a convincing explanation for the origin of life ? Can reductionism really explain the nature of consciousness - or life ?
If the universe really has more than 4 dimensions, what are the others and can we influence (or be influenced by) them ? Are current physical theories which assume more than 4 dimensions unfalsifiable ?
Is Darwinian evolution (DE) unfalsifiable (not because it assumes more than 4 dimensions !) ? It purports to explain the variation of life based on a few assumptions, but appears to explain nothing else - does this mean that it's an ad hoc theory (notice the similarity here with the theory of Lorentz contraction) ? Compare this biological evolution theory with a physical evolution theory, the Big Bang theory, which was not formulated to account for the expansion of the universe - this was a consequence of general relativity; it also makes many other predictions which have been verified. What does this reveal about the scientific quality of current biological evolution 'theories' (apart from it's ad hocness, how much quantitative support exists for DE anyway) ? - I'm not suggesting that DE is totally false, just that it should be tested more rigorously and is probably only an approximation to a more comprehensive evolution theory (in the same way that Newtonian mechanics is an approximation of special relativity).
Some less well-known but important issues
Some political and current issues for consideration:
is hereby awarded by CH to MPatel in recognition of his many excellent edits of a multitude of physics-related articles, and in gratitude for all his good work in WikiProject GTR.
The Working Man's Barnstar
I hereby award this barnstar to Mpatel for his tireless efforts to improve Islam related articles such as Ali. Thank you for your diligence! Peter Deer (talk) 20:43, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
