Conservapedia:Conservapedian mathematics/Open letter to Ed Poor
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[edit] An Open Letter to Ed Poor
Ed:
I hope you are well rested from your month-long vacation from people trying to improve CP's math and science educational articles.
- Dare we say "save CP as an educational resource"? That characterization is quite apt, because the educational articles in this area have fallen into a deplorable state of disrepair, and the powers that be seem to be badly neglecting this important part of CP's mission.
I can assure you that I am well-rested. I have spent the month in deep and somber reflection and contemplation of my actions, as one is supposed to do when blocked. I have also surveyed the devastation, and have come up with a large number of examples of really bad writing, a few of which I have listed in the next section. Some of the bad writing was introduced quite recently (within the last month, while I was blocked and couldn't do anything) and was not reverted or repaired. It would seem that there are no active CP contributors who are qualified or motivated (I don't know which) to maintain these articles. Because of this, the quality of the math and science articles has actually declined over the last month, in addition to the problems that occurred (integration, derivative, integral, gradient, manifold, radioactivity. etc) in the days leading up to that. This is not what "building an encyclopedia" or "making substantive contributions" should mean.
One of the things I did in the last month was to check the state of educational knowledge of the relationship between "radiation" and "radioactivity", an issue that you seem to have been perplexed by here. The McGraw-Hill Children's Dictionary (ISBN 1-57768-298-X) is a resource that I would judge to be aimed at 10-year-olds, at least 6 years younger than what I think CP's target audience should be. The blurb on the back cover indicates a target audience of "elementary school through middle school". I believe that means 8- to 13-year-olds.
Their entry for radioactivity is:
- The giving off of energy as a result of the decay of unstable atoms.
- Uranium has a high level of radioactivity.
Their entry for radiation is:
- The waves of energy sent out by sources of heat or light, or by a radioactive material.
- She wore a hat to protect her skin from the radiation of the sun.
- Many people are concerned about radiation from nuclear waste.
And yet the changes that you made to the page indicated that you didn't want to deal with the topic even at that introductory level. Furthermore, you made it impossible for anyone else to deal with it, by deleting the page and by blocking people. As a result, CP's page on radioactivity is not even up to the standards of the McGraw-Hill Children's Dictionary. And everyone is afraid to touch it, as though the page itself were radioactive.
In addition to the pages that were damaged by your actions of about a month ago, some more pages have deteriorated in the last month, of which I will list some below. This would not have happened if you had not driven away so many good contributors:
- Mathoreilly
- DanielB
- LemonPeel
- myself
- Fantasia
- Wandering
I have had to watch helplessly as pages were subject to inept edits.
(By the way, I'm not endorsing everything that these people did. But they were good people with good ideas, They deserved better treatment.)
[edit] It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken (with apologies to Frank Perdue)
Writing educational math and science articles, even at the elementary school level, requires an enormous amount of expertise, knowledge, and skill. Just knowing the subject matter at the level being taught isn't enough. One must know how to present it in a way that is both pedagogically correct for the intended audience and meticulously correct on the facts. The example below regarding "center" is a very simple example of getting it wrong.
Conservapedia had a particular influx of real experts about a month ago, and they were all driven away.
[edit] Articles that need improvement
- Center—"a point that, on average, the points of the shape are equidistant from"? If you take the average of a set of measurements, you will get just one number. Of course the result will all be the same! This is muddled thinking. A correct definition is a little more complicated, but not too much so.
- Eigenvector and Eigenvalue—Believe it or not, these concepts can be explained in a sensible, albeit elementary way, to ambitious high school students.
- Quantum mechanics—More difficult to do well, but we really can do a lot better, if you let people work on it.
There are a number of others; I won't bore you with the details. One of them was edited by someone with impressive status at CP, in a manner that seems to me to be parody, or, at the very least, not serious.
[edit] Restoring material
So what do I want from you? Ideally, I'd like you to apologize for your actions, unblock the remaining people, and indicate that you (and others) will obtain an expert consensus before deleting edits or blocking accounts in the future. But if this is not something that you are able to do, I will understand.
But I really would like you to make available the material that you deleted from Radioactivity and natural logarithm. It seems that you not only reverted the entire contents of these pages, but you deleted the entire edit history (and, ine case, the entire page), so that no one can see the former content. Please make that former content available, either by restoring the former history and then editing the current content on top of that, or by making the former content available elsewhere. Here on my user page, my talk page, your page, a subpage of something, email; anywhere. That way, I may be able to make a good decision how to proceed.
Whether I will actually do anything is another matter. If I'm going to be blocked and/or have my work deleted, there's really no point, is there?
SamHB[1] 19:59, 5 August 2008 (EDT)
