Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-11-05/In the media

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• WikiTweaks needs more work. Once loaded it works by default. There is no search bar, and as far as I can see no way of accessing a userpage. The only way of bypassing it is to remove it completely. Apwoolrich (talk) 07:49, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
• I read the headline along the lines of "MH17 conspiracy theories predict the flu". :-/ Please be more careful in your use of a semicolon! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 22:11, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

• That would have been a much more interesting story! Gamaliel (talk) 23:08, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

I read the opposite, which was even more confusing; somehow the process of predict flu has involved MH17 conspiracy theories. I don't think a semi-colon in a list of only two items is valid. --Escape Orbit ^(Talk) 13:54, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

• As far as I can quickly tell the English Wikipedia has the 7,000 meter ceiling figure from 26 December 2011 (before which it did indeed say 10,000m) up to the afternoon of 21st of July when an edit war, mainly with IPs, erupted, resulting in the page being semi-protected, in which state it remains to this day. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:33, 6 November 2014 (UTC).
  

• Usually, when stories refer to specific edits, I try to find them, but the documentary was unclear as to which particular language Wikipedia he was referring to, or perhaps he meant multiple Wikipedias. I suspect he was referring to the German Wikipedia, but as I was unsure, I just quoted him and left it at that. Gamaliel (talk) 23:08, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

• 10k was added in December 2004. Renata (talk) 17:57, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

• The Irish Independent included the quote -

"Men have no problem writing in an authoritative voice in an area they know nothing about. Women say 'Oh, I'm not enough of an expert in that' - but we'd never hear a man saying that." _{Jimmy Wales}

- which as well as being a sweeping generalisation, made it into University Challenge (or a previous incarnation of the quote did), in the same episode where the question about the divisions of a distribution labelled 25th, 50th and 75th was answered "quartile". All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:51, 6 November 2014 (UTC).

• There's something very basic about this whole 7K m versus 10K m thing that seems obvious to me that I haven't seen mentioned (maybe if I spent a bunch of time reading about this topic I would find it). Why does anyone think that a fighter has to reach the altitude of a target in order to shoot it down? What's to stop an air-to-air missile from rocketing from the point of launch (at, say, 6K m) toward the target (at, say, 10K m)? Am I missing something here (possible), or are people being really stupid by not thinking about that (also possible)? I am not even speculating here about which side shot the plane down—whoever did it is a piece of shit, regardless. I am just asking about obvious logic. Quercus solaris (talk) 17:49, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

• @Quercus solaris: There were many technical questions regarding that piece I was unable to answer. That is the problem with conspiracy theories: the conspiracy theorist can speculate wildly without needing facts or knowledge, but the resulting theories often require specialized expertise to definitively debunk. I did some research, but none of the media sources have addressed this beyond pointing to the manufacturer's specifications. I even sent off an email to an aviation expert but got no response. Getting those answers would require time, effort, and knowledge that I don't have to devote to a short Signpost piece. A definitive answer will unfortunately wait for something like Popular Mechanics or Skeptoid. Gamaliel (talk) 18:21, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

• Thanks, Gamaliel. Just want to reassure that I wasn't picking on the journalism at all—I was just wondering about the apparent logical gap in the antiaircraft arguments or counterarguments. I hold the participants in the debate responsible for addressing that (not the reporter who reported the debate's existence). Admittedly, I won't spend the time to follow up within that debate to see whether the question gets answered. Thanks to all of the reporters who write the Signpost—I enjoy reading it and appreciate the volunteering that produces it! Quercus solaris (talk) 23:52, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

• Thanks, User:Quercus solaris. I hope you didn't read my response as defensive, as that wasn't my intent at all. I didn't take your comments as criticism, I just wanted to share some of the dead ends that I ran into while researching this story. Gamaliel (talk) 21:21, 11 November 2014 (UTC)