Get rid of Wiki markup. Replace it with HTML. HTML has evolved a lot and HTML5 is quite amazing. If HTML5 cannot yet replace all the features of Wiki markup, then it should be extended. But Wiki markup is a bad idea and should be discarded.
References:
code.google.com wiki2html; Parses wiki markup and generates HTML5
As for replacing Wikipedia, there is a serious problem with Wikipedia which has become more and more apparent to me over time reading articles about plants and particularly herbs. Humans have used herbs for thousands of years and while scientific information about them is useful, it is not the only valid way in which humans understand and use them.
Wikipedia allows derogatory attacks against all other forms of understanding and relating to herbs which is not scientific. It is biased and limited because of this and has not endeavored to address the issue. By address the issue I mean that it is not acceptable for derogatory statements to be made about the understanding of plants which are not strictly scientific.
I have just been reading Heidegger’s excellent essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” which touches in a major way upon this. Yet his philosophy is not easily understood by many. In “Building Dwelling Thinking” he describes modes of human thought an understanding which surpass scientific reckoning and shows that they are not just more valid, but that they are essential.
This is quite esoteric philosophy that is difficult for many to understand. For example, in one example also taken from Heidegger (I can’t remember which essay it was offhand), if you are in a room and there is a door across from you in the room, the distance between you and the door is not merely some number that is mapped out in Cartesian space.
Until you fully think this through and comprehend Heidegger’s ontology, it doesn’t make sense. But Heidegger shows that the distance that the human experiences – whether they are for example going out the door to some festive occasion such as a wedding, or whether they are going out for some somber occasion, perhaps after news that someone very dear to them has passed away – that that distance is in fact actual distance.
We cannot understand anything without understanding Being and how Being both presents itself to us humans and also withdraws away at times. What we do, by failing to think, is create horrible disasters and catastrophes over and over again. As our scientific reckoning advances and becomes almost complete in terms of its depiction of everything, we witness at the same time massive failure. We see humanity receeding backwards in significant, essential ways instead of advancing. This is not an accident. It is because, as Heidegger wrote:
The essence of enframing is that setting upon, gathered into itself, which entraps the truth of its own coming-to-presence with oblivion.
Wikipedia attempts to not just provide information about things. In terms of many of its articles, it is attempting to be a scientific proof of things, which is quite another project. It is possible to make statements about thing A. This is the thing. These are characteristics about it. These are ways people use it.
Then, regarding for exampling therapeutic or health benefits about say a particular herb, it can be possible to say that This herb is used for A. It is also valid to say that There has been some research into A which has not established any definitive biochemical link to B. However it is another thing when authors of Wikipedia basically bash any and all claims which are not based on published scientific literature, with the full backing and support of the Wikipedia foundation behind it.
For example, there was a prominent article at guardian.co.uk a while back which took aim at the concept of cleansing. There are a lot of herbal, nutritional, and other things which are intended to help cleanse the body. The article blasted these things and claimed that they are basically all completely false.
But it is the most basic thing to anyone who knows about food and the uses of plants that cleansing is absolutely valid. For example, if you go out one night and drink a lot, smoke a lot, ingest a lot of whatever stuff, there are absolutely, beyond question many things that you can do to help your body deal with the stress you have placed on it. These things will help your body feel better, help it recover from the stresses being placed on it, and definitely help it flush out toxins more quickly. To claim otherwise is completely ignorant. Yet that is what the Guardian article did.
I find it odd also that a lot of this bunk is originating from the UK, which is also the seat of a type of “analytic” “philosophy” which mostly has nothing to do with actual philosophy and philosophical thinking.
Without it having to be “proved”, when a wise human being interacts with a plant, there is a lot that happens. That relation and that wisdom is something very valid and important. The human body is capable of a high degree of analysis of its environment in ways that often far exceed what science is capable of. The human body will tell when something is harmful or out of balance. It knows far better than what any doctor can say what is right for it.
Yes there is a place for scientific knowledge and research, but that knowledge is only one way of looking at reality, and in fact not the most essential.
I know that most people are simply not capable of understanding Heidegger’s thinking. They will fail for precisely the reasons Heidegger explains in depth in his writings. People are so mired in their inherited concepts of what they think truth means, that they become incapable of truly thinking and can only reckon. But reckoning does not replace thinking, which is something essentially human.
Wikipedia as basically degenerated into a free-for-all of authors running amok bashing information in articles which is not “backed up” by scientific literature.
For example, there is a very old herbal formula in Chinese Traditional Medicine called Yin Chiao which helps with colds. There are other, similar herbal formulas which have been used for centuries. In Wikipedia, it is acceptable to completely bash statements about herbs that are not “scientifically” proven. Thus, an author could edit a Wikipedia entry about a Chinese herb formula and basically say that its completely bullshit.
If anyone else tries to edit it and say “Hey, wait a minute!” they will only get attacked and out-edited. They get bashed down. The fact that this occurs on Wikipedia is not just some minor policy issue. It is a huge issue and represents a major failure, a major breakdown of the project and what its objectives are.
If you are feeling run down and I take an organic lemon and squeeze its juice into a glass and add some honey to it, and you drink it and are like “Wow! I feel so much better”, but then some Wikipedia editor comes along and says “There’s no scientific evidence whatsoever that a dilute solution of citric acid with glucose in H2O has any beneficial effect whatsoever on human immunomodulatory function” you and I would both be like “What the fuck!?”.
One area where there is an issue with regard to claims for the sake of marketing purposes is the cosmetics and skincare industry. To anyone who uses skincare products they will know full well the extent to which claims are made about products. When you enter a beauty store, you will encounter sales people who will not hesitate to tell you that product A does X Y and Z.
Of course their statement is based only on what the manufacturer claims, and the claims of the manufacturer usually don’t hold up under scrutiny. For example it may be claimed that some product “eliminates wrinkles” when in actuality, even if you just rubbed anything on your skin every day for a week, like say water or vegetable oil, it is likely to also have some effect eliminating wrinkles. In other words, it takes almost nothing to make a claim that something eliminates wrinkles.
But to people who are aware, if you really use products and experiment, you may eventually discover that things like natural, plant-based skincare treatments often work much better in the long-term than highly-synthetic ones from beauty stores with all their claims.
Those natural formulas haven’t been subject to rigorous scientific testing but then, people who use for example rosehip, argan, or other oils on their skin will immediately and without question know that they are very beneficial for skin.
Now imagine that some Wikipedian comes in and starts basically saying that everything they know is bullshit. Do they have a right to, just because someone hasn’t subjected an oil or herb to a mass spectrometric analysis, to start bashing every statement you make?
You have all this knowledge about things which is very useful and very much a part of you and your life, and they, like some gross troll, are standing there constantly invalidating everything, pooing in their pants every time you make a statement about how helpful or beneficial something is. After a while you start to realize that the Wikipedian has a strange type of disease and you feel sad for them because they live in a very closed world.
If this is true for things like oils or herbs, how much more true is it for major things like the Large Hadron Collider? I guess I can understand that people want to know, but is it really essential to build such monstrosities? What is gained from it?
Let’s say that it eventually leads to some understanding that will help tap a new source of energy that can be used by humans. Is it really the case that we need to do that?
Human beings are already failing to heed nature screaming at them from massive abuses because of human greediness. Because of the violent and violating demand for ever more “power”, humans create horrific catastrophes which includes vast ecological destruction and the changing of Earth’s environment. So what then of all this “energy”? Is not the danger that people are not aware of their present condition and continue to seek still more forms of “power” and “energy”, at the expense of everything in our world?
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