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Posts
2
Comments
93
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I was a volunteer admin on the site ~15 years ago. I think I still have privileges there, but haven't been actively editing or adminning recently due to a long series of policy changes that removed almost all of the site's appeal to users such as myself. The site split from ehow due to a founders' dispute over the value of crowdsourcing and wiki-spirited openness. Now that wikihow is doing everything that Jack Herrick hated about ehow, I think it's time to call his experiment a failure.

    Most of the content is now being created by staff writers, often for advertising sponsors. Often not even a how-to topic. Many of these articles are fully protected. It's very much the sort of crap I used to delete, when I was deleting crap for them. Most non-staff articles are hidden and unsearchable.

    There is no quality control. Staff have openly embraced SEO and clickbait engagement metrics, at the expense of factual accuracy. This has resulted in the mass emigration of editors like me who used to provide fact-checking services. The "expert review" is a joke. It's only there because Google thinks it makes the site credible. Google is wrong and are defrauding their searchers too.

    There is no editing community anymore. Some children like the gamification aspects and use user spaces as a social media and chat site. It's not well-suited for that purpose, but they're children and don't know any better. I think one editor from my era is still active. I don't know why he's still there.

    They're arguably violating the copyright of their editors by hiding the history tabs and denying CC-BY attribution. They did CYA by only using the CC licensing for external reuse, while granting wikihow broad rights to use submitted content commercially and without attribution. This policy was not as well advertised as the Creative Commons part, and no doubt some of the content creators from my era either didn't notice, or expected wikihow to not abuse it. Hiding this also adversely affects readers' ability to access an article's reliability by checking for better versions and impedes the transition from reader to editor.

  • Thank you for your service.

  • I'd require something after algebra 2, but not necessarily calculus. Calc 1 should be an option, just not the only one. Other options could include Stats / Data Analysis, or a Discrete math with CS algorithmic applications.

    When I include statistics here, I don't mean the more common (and IMO useless) pre-calculus stats class where you get to calculate the standard deviation of 5 numbers and draw box plots. I'd rather a class inspired by How to Lie with Statistics. Techniques for collecting biased data, or selectively interpreting good data to reach a pre-determined conclusion. Immediate career implications for prospective journalists, politicians, marketers, etc. and also societally useful in a Defense Against the Dark Arts sort of way.

  • I'm not dexterous enough to do the 1024 thing. Usually I just point my index finger at the appropriate point on a meter stick. With cm precision, that's 100 and if I do the same with my other hand, I can count 10000

  • Marketing a 512 GB device is maliciously and intentionally deceptive. If it were 500GB, the consumer has fair warning that the size is not a power of 2 and might suspect that the GBs aren't binary either. There is no reason to make it 512GB except to imply the consumer is getting their full 2^39 bytes.

  • Do you mean overall, as a societal ill? or on a per mile basis?

    If the answers are different, it's only because even drunks know better than to go street racing.

  • Pronounce and pronunciation seem like they should have the same root, but one of them has an extra 'o' for some perfectly logical reason. I know the difference and don't consistently misspell it, but if I edit a sentence to switch from one to the other without noticing that it's a danger inflection ...

    Also maintain vs. maintenance for the same reason.

  • "Please don't be offended if I get an erection during this scene."

    "Also, please don't be offended if I don't."

  • Will this suspect be sentenced to more than 6 months? Place your wager now at JailKings, the official betting partner of the Lake County Lockup. Get a $50 signup bonus with your first deposit. See official terms and conditions. Problem gamblers call 1-800-YOU-LOSE for help.

  • Push the white button to make it start in Black mode.

  • Removed

    What in the world

    Jump
  • Or they did, and the lawyer says, "I won't risk my license putting my name on that horseshit. If this is really how you want to proceed, you'll have to do it yourself."

    Which translates to, "I consulted with an attorney who suggested I send you this demand letter."

  • A woman from Kalamazoo

    Whose limericks stopped at line two

  • A shining wit?

  • I've blocked a few repost bots, but I think only one human-controlled account.

  • One of the first big kids' books I read on my own. I should re-read the series as an adult since I might have been almost too young for it the first time.

  • I've heard it speculated that certain religious dietary restriction such as Kosher and Halal prohibit many of the foods that would have been most difficult to render safe with the available technology. Without anything resembling modern germ theory, they couldn't articulate any scientific justification, so it was just "God says these lobsters aren't food." And yet, the people who believed that probably got less food poisoning than the people who didn't.

  • Live to be 80 and retire to an assisted living apartment. The slight differences in life expectancy really show up at the back end. My grandpa spent a year as the only man on his floor and got all the geriatric pussy he could handle. Plus, since he was nearly blind from macular degeneration, he imagined them all as beautiful.

    Take care of your health, and good luck with the ladies!

  • You were right, even if it was for the wrong reason.

    The Zillow listing said acres where they presumably meant square feet which are a lot smaller. This is a city lot, probably less than even a single acre.

  • Elliptical orbit is what you get when all gravity vectors point to a single source such as Earth's center of mass. If you instead make the "flat Earth" assumption that all gravity vectors are parallel, then you get a parabola. Since most of us aren't throwing things very far on a planetary scale, the parabolic approximation is frequently considered "good enough".

  • Is this, by any chance, about Rosa DeLauro representing Connecticut's third congressional district?

  • No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world

    Why do Olympic medalists bite their medals?

  • You Should Know @lemmy.world

    YSK about the condensation pipe on your gas furnace