• 4 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 19th, 2023

help-circle


  • A problem with Wikipedia is that experts are not allowed to contribute to their areas of expertise because they’re “biased” (see edit below). I know a professor at a top university who used to spend his free time editing Wikipedia outside of his specific area but in his broad area of expertise as a method of disseminating science knowledge to the public. When the higher-up Wikipedia editors found out who he was, they banned his account and IP from editing.

    Having the lay public write articles works when expertise isn’t required to understand something, but much of Wikipedia around science is slightly inaccurate at best. (This is still true, probably owing to the neutral point of view rule [giving weight to fringe ideas as a result] or the secondary source prioritization over primary sources.)

    Edit: current Wikipedia editing rules and guidelines would not support this ban, so things appear to have changed. Wikipedia still recommends against primary sources as authoritative sources of information (recommending secondary sources instead), which is not great. But, they explicitly now welcome subject matter experts as editors.




  • No, glia support neurons; they do things like redirecting blood flow to more-active-than-usual neurons, mylenate axons, etc. They wouldn’t form a mesh around neurons’ photoreceptors the same way they do neurons’ somas and axons. What the article describes is that glia actually are critical at allowing for color vision during the day and night vision at night, since on land we’d get too much blue light to see color with much fidelity were it not for glia, and a similar filtration process helps us see at night. It’s not that it’s not as bad as it could be, it’s actually that vision is better this way (barring one small blind spot outside of our fovea–which, being outside of the fovea, would have low acuity anyways).