So... this new banner thing? Usually I'm not one to invoke "slippery slope" kinds of arguments but the way this one has popped up all of sudden does make me think that it - the "scholarly advertisement" - is a way of conditioning teh Wikipedians to seeing more of this kind of thing in the future. Maybe my cynicism has spun out of control.

Speaking of that, I really like Coren's attempt at bragging about his knowledge of game theory (with a somewhat ominous edit summary "no worries"). Now, the thing is, if you know anything about game theory, and you know anything about the actual games that this experiment involves (to wit, the Ultimatum game, the Dictator game and the Public goods game) then you know that these kinds of experiments have been run before literally hundred of thousands of times (the specific appeal of this one is apparently that they're hoping to get a huge number of response which would make it bigger sample size than anything that's been done before) and you know that game theory is completely of no use in helping you make these kinds of decisions.

In fact, the whole purpose of these experiments is to examine how your basic game theory FAILS in the real world. And given that it fails, it means you can't use it in these experiments.
He's basically bragging that he knows how to play tic-tac-toe, and hoping that his audience is ignorant enough of the game of tic-tac-toe that this sounds impressive to them. Phony. Poseur. Arbitrator. Arbitrator candidate in the present election.

I, for one, welcome advertising on Wikipedia - it will finally give me something interesting to read on the site!



Hmmm, I wonder what kind of games our favorite Quebec pornographer likes to play?

I might actually welcome it too. Maybe if there are people staking their money on the viability of the thing it would actually become at least somewhat accountable (though that's hoping for too much). The thing that irritates me is the ... wait for it... wait for it ... yes, the hypocrisy of how it's been introduced. Not like that's news here or anything but still.

Mods, maybe merge this thread with the first one on the subject?

If such a senior editor on WP is an expert on Game Theory, why is the WP article on it such rubbish?

You know, I actually remember when the article on Game Theory was half way decent and WikiProject GameTheory was half-viable or at least semi-active. But GT is one of those topics that by its nature suffers from a pretty high rate of depreciation as every joker off the street comes in to include their own ideas about what "theory of games" (everyone plays games right? so everyone can be an expert on game theory on wikipedia!) is all about.

You can still even see the vestiges of the decent article that GT article once was in the text of the current one. It's like some kind of a fossil from 2005 buried under a heap of rubble.

I'd like to understand more about this. I am a specialist in a narrow area, but everything I see in that area in Wikipedia is rubbish, and I recognise that fossil from 2005-7 effect, and subsequent rot, as well. But I don't know whether that is just my subject area, or is wider spread. I.e. is the badness a symptom of a wider badness that I am unable to recognise because I am not a specialist in the wider areas? Or is it confined to my own?

Could someone take me through the Game Theory article and explain exactly what is wrong with it?

Well, for starters, the lede is just horribly written:

"Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games" (actually game theory is very rarely used to analyze actual "games", like poker or whatever, for various reasons. To the extent it sometimes is (chess for example) these are not the major applications of the method)

"The subject first addressed zero-sum games, such that one person's gains exactly equal net losses of the other participant(s)." - not really true. For example Cournot's application of game theoretic tools to analysis of oligopolies in the 1800's dealt with non-zero sum games. It's true for some subset of strictly mathematical research into game theory that occurred in the 1930's and 40's.

"Today, however, game theory applies to a wide range of class relations,..." - I don't even know what 'a wide range of class relations' is supposed to mean here - "...and has developed into an umbrella term for the logical side of science...." - what the hell is the "logical side of science"? As opposed to the "illogical side of science"

". Classic uses include a sense of balance in numerous games" - again, huh? It's trying to say that the usual analysis includes some kind of a equilibrium solution concept (say Nash equilibrium or its refinements) but calling that 'a sense of balance' is just weird. Perhaps some of this was imported from some foreign language wiki and filtered through google translate?

"Mathematical game theory had beginnings with some publications by Émile Borel, which led to his book Applications aux Jeux de Hasard. However, his results were limited, and the theory regarding the non-existence of blended-strategy equilibrium in two-player games was incorrect." - while Borel was a great mathematician, his relationship to game theory is pretty tenuous. You could just as well invoke a number of other mathematicians who dealt with "games". I also like this "some publications" and the immediate dropping of a technical term "blended-strategy equilibrium" without defining it first or even wikilinking it (whatever it is - I can't find much on this particular term except in Wikipedia mirrors. I've never heard of it. It could be just a sloppy mistranslation/misnaming of a "mixed strategy equilibrium")

The rest of the lede is more or less okay - it's the buried fossil part - though perhaps it also uses some technical terms without defining them or linking to them.

So that's as far as the lede goes.

Excellent - is it just the introduction? Or are there demons lurking in the body of the article?

I don't know about demons, but imps certainly. The main body is a mish-mash of decently written text from long ago, somebody's peculiar OR ("drama theory"???), repetitive statements (the paragraph in history section which describes Von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior twice in a row, completely oblivious to the sentence(s) that just precede it, extremely poor organization, crappy writing ("The first known use is to describe and model how human populations behave.") a whole bunch of this Wikipedia-house style "some people say this, but other people say that" and a bit of apparent axe-grinding. Etc.

You'd hardly expect Coren to give up his secret winning strategies, would you?

Just compare it to the Britannica entry.
Plus, the WP article is longer than the Britannica article, as well as being unintelligible. And is tagged as needing
citations, despite being followed by a long list of references. The trifecta of stupid.

This WP article is another good example of "Wiki-slobber". It goes on and on but doesn't tell you
what the hell "game theory" really is. Someone wrote a decent article back in the 2005-2007
peak period, and thereafter, idiots (and idiots with reformatting bots) messed with it.

Another example is Stress; it has an incomplete and poorly written introduction followed by 6 different grad students' favorite tensor calculus derivations. Meanwhile, it completely fails to provide a real-world, plain English description. Look how far you have to read to find that brittle materials fail under normal stress and ductile materials fail under shear - probably the most important concepts which also lend themselves to understanding the topic. Next the article focuses almost exclusively on solids ... what about fluids, viscous liquids and gasses? The section on Mohr's circle, one of the more useful stress calculations, has been deleted in favor of more idiotic tensor math that nobody cares about or will ever use.

If a person doesn't know much about stress and goes to that article, they will come away more confused, not less.

This is typical of many Wikipedia articles that attract geek teenagers trying to prove how smart they are. It ends up as lumps of mash potatoes splattered on the wall.

God help any freshman engineering student who tries to use that for actual studying.

There are so many articles in this state, and they are changing so quickly and randomly, I would
not even hazard a guess as to how many there are. Virtually any serious subject in math or
math-related science is prone to such "churning"--most especially the ones that are "popular",
thus attracting a lot of eyeballs.

Another one: Fluidics. A complete pile of WTF hash.

Crowdsourcing can work, if someone reserves editorial control over the final product. This is the
one thing Wikipedia will never have---and it will end up destroying Wikipedia.

I think you're right about the need for some kind of editorial control. The problem (one of many) that Wikipedia has though is its insane pursuit of volume rather than quality.

It's not just math or math-related science. Social science gets it too. For an example of some really horrendous writing see the article on Immigration.

(Not that previous versions were better)

I haven't looked at it in a long time, but Hard drive has always been a pile of random technojunk gabbled together without much coherency. In general the individual tidbits are often true, but the presentation is confusing rather than illuminating. Overall the presentation is "by geek for geek" and not terribly useful to a layperson. Critical facts that would help ordinary people understand the article are either absent, or presented in such a manner that you'd only recognize them if you already knew them.

I thought that it was generally assumed, at least at this board, that this was the ultimate goal of Wikipedia's god-king.

Some articles are better than others. Very, very few are excellent, but some are satisfactory and are often more up to date and detailed than any other readily available summary. My belief is that you could extract a few thousand good articles (not to be confused with Good Articles!) and, with minimal editing, you'd have quite a nice reference work. It would have very uneven coverage of course, with some extremely important topics unrepresented and far too much on for example small towns where some resident has crafted a good article as a labour of love.

I agree with the comments on the Game theory artocle.