Hey Jed,
Congratulations on your progress on the Wiki CF page. You have been surprisingly diplomatic ;) . I also respect the time you put in as evidenced by the discussion page.
I tried to be diplomatic. But I must say, the Wikipedia CF article there is an unholy mess, and I do not have the energy to fix it properly. It is a mishmash of nonsense and real information. It gives you new respect for academic traditions such as peer review and the PhD exam.
I wonder how many other articles in that encyclopedia are unreliable? I suspect that most useful information in most books is a mixture of truth and falsehood, sense and nonsense. You can be pretty sure that an article in an Almanac describing the structure of state governments or the history of the Post Office is correct, but valuable information about nature or controversial new discoveries will probably always be a stew of confusion, emotion and politics. The Scientific American still cannot bring itself to write the simple truth about early aviation and the Wright Brothers. Their 2003 review was nearly as absurd as their famous comments back in 1906. Gene Mallove summed it up beautifully in his quote from Emilo Segre, F. F. I, p. 22, describing the work of Hahn and Meitner:
"Their early papers are a mixture of error and truth as complicated as a mixture of fission products resulting from the bombardments. Such confusion was to remain for a long time a characteristic of much of the work on uranium."
2. You've established a method, using references, that is acceptable to the Wiki community. As you and others will note, your work has not been defaced or challenged.
So far. There is no telling when a skeptic will come and erase it. There is no control and no recourse. That is the main reason I will not put any effort into correcting all the other mistakes.
So there is hope. I'll see what I can do to help, a little bit here and there. Maybe we can make the Wiki page the best, most accurate, and most progressive reference for CF after all.
Perhaps it will be the best for the general public, but for scientists nothing can beat original sources.
- Jed
