Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello there, everyone,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Pollette, and
Speaker 1: I am the tech editor here at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot Com. As usual, sitting across from me is the
Speaker 1: man we all know as senior writer, Jonathan Strickland. Helloha, y'all. Helloha.
Speaker 1: Well it makes sense considering what we're gonna talk about. Yes,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna talk about it really fast. Yeah. Well, first,
Speaker 1: let's uh, let's go into a little listener mail. This
Speaker 1: listen mail comes from Matt from Boulder, Colorado, and Matt says, Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I'm a high school science teacher and have been involved
Speaker 1: in a huge battle for the past couple of years.
Speaker 1: Throughout the year, I assigned some research projects for my
Speaker 1: students nuclear energy, sources of energy, physics of musical instruments,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And when the students go to the computer
Speaker 1: line up to find information for their projects, the first
Speaker 1: website they jumped to is Wikipedia. No matter how hard
Speaker 1: I try to drill into their heads, that is not
Speaker 1: a valid source of info. They still use it. Since
Speaker 1: you guys do lots of research, could you explain to
Speaker 1: all of your young listeners out there the dangers of Wikipedia?
Speaker 1: Thanks Matt Well. I think, um, before we get into that,
Speaker 1: I think what we should do is talk about wikis because, um,
Speaker 1: you know, Wikipedia is sort of a love hate thing
Speaker 1: with a lot of people, and we'll get into the
Speaker 1: reasons why. But the wiki itself is a pretty useful tool. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's essentially what it is is. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a wiki. It's a web page. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: web page. And um, actually I kind of think of
Speaker 1: it as sort of a microcosm of the web, because
Speaker 1: you're creating your own version of the Worldwide Web. Every
Speaker 1: time you create a page on a wiki, you can
Speaker 1: link it to the other pages on the wiki, and
Speaker 1: it could be on anything and everything. We'll tell you why.
Speaker 1: I got a great idea. Okay, let's uh just gonna
Speaker 1: take you right over here. Right, you see where I'm
Speaker 1: leading you, right to the machine over here. I'll get
Speaker 1: into the way back. Okay, there you go. All right,
Speaker 1: I'm done, I'll get in all right. I'm setting this
Speaker 1: for nine and we're gonna travel through time and space
Speaker 1: because we're going to Hawaii. Oh man, smell that fresh air,
Speaker 1: not like Atlanta at all, cold cold Atlanta. And now
Speaker 1: we're in Hawaii, and and it's great because you know
Speaker 1: as soon as you step out of the time machine,
Speaker 1: they're waiting there with you know, decorative lace and the
Speaker 1: co couldnut drinks and its breast skirts and the sea
Speaker 1: turtles and the spam and the boys. Pardon me, I
Speaker 1: need to get a big rock and break the time machine. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't want to go back either, all right. But
Speaker 1: the reason why I brought you here was to point out, well,
Speaker 1: there's one there's when you see the bus over there,
Speaker 1: you see what the name is on that bus. It's
Speaker 1: hard to be account from here. It says wiki because
Speaker 1: I k I it means it's an expression for quick. Oh.
Speaker 1: That explains why I was going quickly right and so
Speaker 1: in n which would be of course today, because we
Speaker 1: took the way back machine word Cunningham, Uh, Cunningham Cunningham
Speaker 1: or cunning Ham if you prefer, I was pronouncing it
Speaker 1: the correct way. He um. He came up with this idea.
Speaker 1: Now he was uh. He used his software developing skills
Speaker 1: and his web developing skills to create the first wiki,
Speaker 1: which was his way of creating an environment where a
Speaker 1: lot of people could share ideas and information in a
Speaker 1: in a collaborative way, um, without having to worry about
Speaker 1: everyone logging into a separate thing and then one person
Speaker 1: taking all of those different pieces and then incorporating them together.
Speaker 1: That wastes a lot of time, you know, you have
Speaker 1: to rely on one person to take all the different
Speaker 1: pieces and and patch something together from them. So he
Speaker 1: created the first wiki. Uh. And then not that long afterward,
Speaker 1: the first public wiki, called the Portland's Pattern Repository shows up.
Speaker 1: And uh, Now Ward's wiki is still active. Yes, so
Speaker 1: you can actually even visit it. Um It's worldwide wiki,
Speaker 1: isn't it? Um? Actually? And I didn't write that down? Well,
Speaker 1: we keep talking, all right, I'll keep talking. So here's
Speaker 1: Ward's idea is that he thinks that if he creates
Speaker 1: this sort of a web environment where anyone can come
Speaker 1: to the web environment and edit things or upload information, um,
Speaker 1: alter things that are already there. Maybe something is interesting
Speaker 1: but it's not really pertinent to that particular discussion, that
Speaker 1: should have its own page. They could create the page
Speaker 1: for that. They could link everything to each other. Um
Speaker 1: and uh and it takes off. Yes, have you found it?
Speaker 1: I'm still looking cud grief too, Yes, okay, because it's
Speaker 1: from Cunningham and Cunningham Incorporated. Ah, there that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Two dot com. So this, this idea catches on and
Speaker 1: becomes a great way for people to collaborate and build information.
Speaker 1: Um and it could be the subject could be anything.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of companies that have wikis, including
Speaker 1: how stuff works. We have a wiki. We did We
Speaker 1: use to to keep check to see it right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't, but we can. That's that's the other thing
Speaker 1: is that wikies don't are not necessarily public. You might
Speaker 1: have to sign in in order to have access to
Speaker 1: a wiki. They're a great tool for people to use
Speaker 1: on their intranet where uh they could share information with
Speaker 1: one another and update that the item. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: I have give access to every day employees to let
Speaker 1: them update the database rather than having to you know,
Speaker 1: have one person do that, which you know, as we
Speaker 1: mentioned before, it takes a lot of time. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: might have things like company policies on there that might
Speaker 1: change over time, and or you might have uh, um,
Speaker 1: you know, other things like employee contact lists stuff like
Speaker 1: that where it makes it easy for someone to come
Speaker 1: in and make a make a change. Let's say that, um,
Speaker 1: you've recently moved and you need to update your address. Well,
Speaker 1: instead of emailing one person who is the keeper of
Speaker 1: the list, it might be on a wiki where you
Speaker 1: can just go and log in and uh and make
Speaker 1: a quick change. We'll tell you what. Let's uh, I guess,
Speaker 1: we guess we have to go back. Well, it's also yeah,
Speaker 1: and we're in We're in Hawaii and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of sun. All right, let's get on in. Come on,
Speaker 1: let's go back to you. You are oil man. It's
Speaker 1: tough coming back anyway. You're going ahead and get out.
Speaker 1: I'll come on, come on. We can't do that alright.
Speaker 1: So we have this web collaboration tool that various companies
Speaker 1: and organizations start using in order to build communal um information. Yes, sectors.
Speaker 1: I guess you could say. It's kind of hard to
Speaker 1: to put a your finger on it. Like you said,
Speaker 1: it is kind of like a miniature worldwide web. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's funny because it's in a way it's
Speaker 1: like a web page. Because wikis generally, especially software used
Speaker 1: specifically to create a wiki, something like media wiki, which
Speaker 1: is UM, the software used to build Wikipedia. UM. You
Speaker 1: can it's free for you to use. You can install
Speaker 1: it on your own website to use UM. It has
Speaker 1: markup in it to UM. The way you create and
Speaker 1: you know, add a link to copy on the page
Speaker 1: or or you know, add some information to the page
Speaker 1: is kind of similar to HTML. UM. It's it's not
Speaker 1: exactly the same. But if you you know, want to
Speaker 1: uh add a link to copy, for example, you just UM,
Speaker 1: you know, put a tag around where the copy is
Speaker 1: and add the link in there and it's ready to go.
Speaker 1: And as a matter of fact, is a little simpler
Speaker 1: even then using HTML right, and you can host files
Speaker 1: and things on a on a server and links to
Speaker 1: it through the wiki. So UM, but it's not exactly
Speaker 1: it's not exactly the same thing as the UH as
Speaker 1: the World Wide Web, and it's also not as uh,
Speaker 1: you know, real time is something like I don't know,
Speaker 1: Google Wave, where you have, you know, a wave going
Speaker 1: on and people can make changes to it at the
Speaker 1: same time. It's not and it does not date like that,
Speaker 1: though I would say that Google Wave definitely must have
Speaker 1: been in the developers Google Wave had to be inspired
Speaker 1: by wikis. It's pretty clear, yeah it's wiki, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's definitely spawn of wiki. But now let's
Speaker 1: move on. Now that we kind of talked about what
Speaker 1: a wicki is and that it's, you know, a communally
Speaker 1: operated and maintained source of information of some sort, let's
Speaker 1: let's sort of segue into Wikipedia itself. Now, Wikipedia was
Speaker 1: the brainchild of a couple of different people, Jimmy Wales
Speaker 1: and Lawrence Singer Um, but it it kind of rose
Speaker 1: up out of the failure of another enterprise. That enterprise
Speaker 1: was called nupedia right now. Nupedia was created back in
Speaker 1: two thousand and that was supposed to be an encyclopedia
Speaker 1: kind of resource, much like Wikipedia turned out to be.
Speaker 1: But the major difference was Nupedia was supposed to have
Speaker 1: expert written and peer reviewed articles in it, So we're
Speaker 1: talking about stuff that's written by people who are recognized
Speaker 1: as experts in whatever field it happens to be, and
Speaker 1: that it went everything was supposed to go through a
Speaker 1: pretty rigorous review process. The problem with that is that
Speaker 1: it's slow. It takes a lot of time to generate
Speaker 1: that kind of content, to review it to make sure
Speaker 1: that everything is accurate, and then to upload. It's no, see,
Speaker 1: it's not wicky at all, it um it is. However,
Speaker 1: how certain sites like how stuff Works does things. Yes,
Speaker 1: you know, we we make sure that we'll all of
Speaker 1: our articles are we write our articles, we we research
Speaker 1: write them and then edit them before they ever go
Speaker 1: up on the site, and they are reviewed. Um. For example,
Speaker 1: Jonathan gets you know, a certain amount of time to
Speaker 1: write an article, and then he gives it to me. Well,
Speaker 1: once I've had an opportunity to you know, make changes
Speaker 1: to that basically replace all the words in there with
Speaker 1: my own. Um. I almost made a spit take if
Speaker 1: I had time. That just right, you always take out
Speaker 1: the word poopy. Um. Once I've had an opportunity to
Speaker 1: edit the article, we send it to another editor who
Speaker 1: has an opportunity to go through and make sure that
Speaker 1: everything is okay, that nothing stands out as uh uh,
Speaker 1: you know, being grammatically incorrect or having voice or having
Speaker 1: the wrong voice, or a flaw and logic or something
Speaker 1: um so, which you know does happen never in Jonathan's
Speaker 1: articles of Um, I never use logic, but well, we
Speaker 1: do that before it's even even published, and then we
Speaker 1: have our publishing operations team take the article and actually
Speaker 1: put it on the website itself. And this does not
Speaker 1: happen in a span of twenty four hours. No, this
Speaker 1: is this process from the moment when someone gets an
Speaker 1: assignment to the moment when it goes up on the site.
Speaker 1: Can be usually it's right around two to three weeks generally,
Speaker 1: but it can be longer. I mean, we schedule things
Speaker 1: out well ahead of time in order to because we
Speaker 1: take that into account. Well, when new Pedia launched after
Speaker 1: six months, do you know how many articles they published? Seven?
Speaker 1: Too many? You you you're, you're That numbers too high.
Speaker 1: Six months, six months, because the process was very rigorous.
Speaker 1: So they started to uh to think, you know, this
Speaker 1: project is gonna take a really long time to get
Speaker 1: off the ground. Maybe we should look at some alternatives
Speaker 1: in the meantime. And that's when they started to think
Speaker 1: about creating a resource where anyone could come in and
Speaker 1: write an article about a particular subject, and anyone else
Speaker 1: could come in and edit that article and contribute his
Speaker 1: or her own information to that article. And that became
Speaker 1: the basis of Wikipedia. Well, that that should be really
Speaker 1: cool because they're all kinds of people who are not
Speaker 1: involved in projects projects like this, who probably have some
Speaker 1: kind of expertise with the topics being explained. Right, So theoretically, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I could be writing an article about, say,
Speaker 1: roller coasters, and a physicist mat might read that and say,
Speaker 1: oh no, no, You've got most of this right. But
Speaker 1: this one section on on inertial velocity is is wrong.
Speaker 1: Let me fix that for you. That should that should
Speaker 1: be a good thing, because that way it would be
Speaker 1: more accurate, and in most cases it is a good thing.
Speaker 1: The philosophy that this is based on is called the
Speaker 1: wisdom of the crowd. So the idea being here that
Speaker 1: that if you think of Wikipedia as a resource that
Speaker 1: any human being could access and contribute to, then eventually,
Speaker 1: as an article develops over time, you should get the
Speaker 1: best information about that particular subject that is out there
Speaker 1: because the people who are doing the research, the people
Speaker 1: who really know what they're talking about, can contribute. So uh,
Speaker 1: over the long run, any particular articles should be the
Speaker 1: best article that you could possibly find. There's some problems
Speaker 1: with this though, during the short run. One is that
Speaker 1: you can have someone post incorrect information a right Another
Speaker 1: is you can have someone with a personal agenda come
Speaker 1: in and post information that that presents a particular subject
Speaker 1: in a good or bad light. Um, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I've I've actually had Laura Eats slugs problem with that
Speaker 1: because I've gone in and found information Wait a minute,
Speaker 1: that wasn't actually pertinent to the article right there in
Speaker 1: the middle, right, Laura, You're gross. I literally have you
Speaker 1: need to come to an article and in the middle
Speaker 1: of the copy was somebody essentially not not in the
Speaker 1: Internet sense, tagging the article with some slur against someone
Speaker 1: else that would have nothing to do with the article.
Speaker 1: So vandalism is a problem. Yes, that would be factually
Speaker 1: inaccurate or intentionally factually inaccurate right now now, Because you
Speaker 1: have a community of users who are who are maintaining Wikipedia. Uh,
Speaker 1: most of the time these problems will be found pretty quickly,
Speaker 1: relatively quickly and fixed. But if you have someone who's
Speaker 1: really determined to make a mess of things, that could
Speaker 1: be an issue for a while until they figure out
Speaker 1: a way of either banning that person or actually taking
Speaker 1: the article off from not not removing it from Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: but moving people's ability to edit that article. Changes might
Speaker 1: get kept on articles. We've seen that happen particularly with
Speaker 1: individuals who are still alive. Anyone who's still alive, that
Speaker 1: that an article based on that person often will get
Speaker 1: frozen so that no one can can contribute to it.
Speaker 1: So that way, if someone does have a personal grudge
Speaker 1: against that that particular individual, they can't just go in
Speaker 1: there and and UH completely um ruined that person's reputation
Speaker 1: through various slurs and insults. And these things are particularly
Speaker 1: um active in cases in which and at least ones
Speaker 1: I've seen politicians like last last year in the United
Speaker 1: or not last year, but two years ago now already um,
Speaker 1: you know, the United States presidential elections. Basically anybody who
Speaker 1: was related to the candidates UH had to have their
Speaker 1: profiles for frozen to keep people from going in and
Speaker 1: you know, saying all kinds of things about them, you know,
Speaker 1: true and false things that it may not be pertinent
Speaker 1: to the actual entry. You know, everybody involved, so you know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't just one side, It was pretty much every side.
Speaker 1: But we've seen this even through things that aren't even
Speaker 1: involved in politics, like corporations try to either um to
Speaker 1: censor information that that is harmful to that corporation, or
Speaker 1: to boost the corporation by including almost ad copy type
Speaker 1: stuff in their their articles. Yes, I'm sure that if
Speaker 1: you go to the entry for how Stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com you will find out that tech stuff is the
Speaker 1: best podcast offered by the site. I'm just saying, I
Speaker 1: don't know how that information would have gotten in there
Speaker 1: if it is still there. But you know, it wasn't
Speaker 1: really there. No, I was just wondering being funny. You
Speaker 1: never trying to be funny. I was about to go
Speaker 1: back and look at the revision history. The revision history
Speaker 1: is actually one of the good things about Wikipedia that
Speaker 1: is very useful. The revision history keep track of all
Speaker 1: the changes that are made to an article. So if
Speaker 1: someone does go in and commit some sort of vandalism
Speaker 1: or you know, users notice something and they think it's
Speaker 1: a little questionable, they can flag the article. Um It's
Speaker 1: easy enough to go back through the revision history and
Speaker 1: see when, uh that that change was put in and
Speaker 1: who did it, and to change it back if necessary,
Speaker 1: So they have a lot of protections there in place. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: let's kind of get into the whole reason about why
Speaker 1: you should not use Wikipedia as a source in things
Speaker 1: like schoolwork and why how stuff works. Dot Com does
Speaker 1: not use Wikipedia. There are a couple of reasons. One
Speaker 1: is the malleable nature of Wikipedia that we've already mentioned
Speaker 1: is that you know, one, it's impossible to determine on
Speaker 1: on any particular day that the article you are reading
Speaker 1: is accurate and factual. Too, even if it is accurate
Speaker 1: and factual, that article may look totally different tomorrow. So
Speaker 1: if you cite an article but then the site disappears
Speaker 1: because someone's made an edit and has removed that part
Speaker 1: of the article, your your source no longer exists. Yep.
Speaker 1: I mean you could go through the revision history and
Speaker 1: try and find it, but that starts getting really kind
Speaker 1: of complicated. Three, it's not a primary source. And Wikipedia
Speaker 1: actually spells this out if you go to Wikipedia and
Speaker 1: you read what Wikipedia is not. One of the things
Speaker 1: Wikipedia is not is a primary source. Now, what that
Speaker 1: means is that Wikipedia is not a place to publish
Speaker 1: something for the very first time. You if you were
Speaker 1: to do a scientific study, you would not publish the
Speaker 1: findings of that study in Wikipedia before you published it
Speaker 1: anywhere else. You would have to have it published in
Speaker 1: a peer of view journal or some other format. Before
Speaker 1: you could reference it in Wikipedia, and you wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to publish it if you put it in a
Speaker 1: peer of view journal. They would never like you put
Speaker 1: the entire full text of THEIA, but you could at
Speaker 1: least reference the findings you could. Now that's I think
Speaker 1: that alone state is a reason why no one should
Speaker 1: use that in any kind of schoolwork or for house
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Just the fact that it's not
Speaker 1: a primary source um. Usually, whenever I have actually thinking
Speaker 1: back on it, I can't think of a single time
Speaker 1: I was a signed of paper where I was told
Speaker 1: that I could use anything other than primary sources. I
Speaker 1: could only use primary sources. Now what that means is
Speaker 1: you can go to Wikipedia and look at the sources
Speaker 1: that Wikipedia used, the people who created that article, and
Speaker 1: track those back and see if those have merit um.
Speaker 1: In most cases you should find that they are coming
Speaker 1: from reputable sources. Once in a while, you might come
Speaker 1: across something that was written by you know, some Yahoo
Speaker 1: and then you you may not want to use that
Speaker 1: as a primary source. But that's that's another good example
Speaker 1: for all students out there. I mean, Wikipedia is maybe
Speaker 1: just uh kind of like a cliffs notes thing. I
Speaker 1: don't like the idea of using it other than just
Speaker 1: to go to the bottom and look at the source list. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's extremely useful as the source of primary sources, right,
Speaker 1: and it can also uh well, I wouldn't use it
Speaker 1: as uh a source for something that I wrote for publication. Um.
Speaker 1: It is useful to to give you an idea of
Speaker 1: a concept. I mean if you have no if you're
Speaker 1: assigned to write of paper on something specific and you
Speaker 1: really don't have any understanding of it, you might use
Speaker 1: Wikipedia as an opportunity to learn a little bit about
Speaker 1: what to expect. When you're doing research on the topic.
Speaker 1: You can kind of do a little uh quick and dirty, well,
Speaker 1: you know, what is this thing about, and then once
Speaker 1: you have an idea of it, you might be able
Speaker 1: to go find some primary sources to give you authoritative
Speaker 1: uh information. That's another good point. That another thing that
Speaker 1: they that Wikipedia and the Wikipedia is not folder or
Speaker 1: or article rather, um it states that Wikipedia is not
Speaker 1: meant for people who are experts in whatever particular field
Speaker 1: that article addresses. So in other words, if you're reading
Speaker 1: an article about electricity, you shouldn't have to be an
Speaker 1: electrician or someone with an events degree in physics in
Speaker 1: order to understand it. So, um, yeah, it is a
Speaker 1: good introductory element. It's a good way of looking for
Speaker 1: primary sources, not necessarily the best if you want to
Speaker 1: cite something in an in a academic paper or what
Speaker 1: we do here at how stuff works. So I I've
Speaker 1: often I know that my criticism of Wikipedia in the
Speaker 1: past has come across as Wikipedia is a bad thing.
Speaker 1: I don't really think Wikipedia is a bad thing. I
Speaker 1: just think it's not. It's not entirely reliable now, and
Speaker 1: I think it's it's not really it's not really Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: and it's not the organization behind Wikipedia. It's people who
Speaker 1: go in and mess with it, and people who go
Speaker 1: in to write articles that aren't, you know, factually accurate. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I I've seen articles on Wikipedia that We're just a joke,
Speaker 1: and they were funny. But and and of course, the
Speaker 1: the community did the right thing and eventually took the
Speaker 1: page down, which um, I was sad about at the time,
Speaker 1: But at the same time I was like, well, if
Speaker 1: Wikipedia didn't take that page down, then the entire community
Speaker 1: becomes a joke, not just that page, because they said, well, look,
Speaker 1: we're we know this isn't real, but we're gonna let
Speaker 1: it slide. That's that's they can't be taken seriously if
Speaker 1: they do that. So they made the right choice. But um,
Speaker 1: I will add to though that the uh that other
Speaker 1: people are starting to take this kind of thinking and
Speaker 1: apply it to their own products and services, like for example,
Speaker 1: Britannica dot com announced a while back now, um I
Speaker 1: guess it's probably a couple of years now, um that
Speaker 1: they were going to allow people to uh contribute to
Speaker 1: Britannic you know, Britannica online. And you're going, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is like the ultimate peer reviewed, high
Speaker 1: end encyclopedia. Why would they do this, Well, they're not
Speaker 1: publishing changes before those changes are reviewed by an expert
Speaker 1: as well, so they are they have put in that
Speaker 1: that extra layer of well, hey, if you know something
Speaker 1: about this, please tell us, but we're going before we
Speaker 1: publish this, we're going to check it out and make
Speaker 1: sure that it's accurate. And Jimmy Wales has suggested that
Speaker 1: the opposite might end up being used over at Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: where they might try and get experts for certain kinds
Speaker 1: of articles to review them and make sure everything is accurate.
Speaker 1: So In other other words, the two different encyclopedia are
Speaker 1: becoming more and more like each other, which is remarkable
Speaker 1: when you think about it. Um, there are other things
Speaker 1: you can use wikis for besides just an information source.
Speaker 1: You know, people are using them to write novels, um
Speaker 1: and there be because they allow contributions, so you can
Speaker 1: have a collaborative novel. That's one of the more interesting
Speaker 1: um uses I've seen for wiki software. My favorite wiki
Speaker 1: was introduced to me today. Oh what is it? Dc
Speaker 1: Wilson of our our beloved Tracy. She sent me a
Speaker 1: link to ten word wiki. It's a wiki wiki that
Speaker 1: is sort of like an encyclopedia, but every single entry
Speaker 1: in the wiki is only ten words long, and many
Speaker 1: of them are halarious. So I do recommend the tin
Speaker 1: word wiki if you want to kill an hour or
Speaker 1: two looking up. And of course, just like Wikipedia, it's
Speaker 1: a lot easier to find the pop culture reference stuff
Speaker 1: than anything else on there. Um that that is one
Speaker 1: other thing I did want to add, just really quickly.
Speaker 1: The the other danger of having a community oriented encyclopedia
Speaker 1: is that you're gonna get entries that uh that if
Speaker 1: you were to to judge the entry by the length,
Speaker 1: how many words are in there. You would start to
Speaker 1: get the feeling that, um, certain pop culture items are
Speaker 1: far more important to us than say, the founding fathers
Speaker 1: of the United States of America. Then you do a
Speaker 1: search on the founding fathers and you might find articles
Speaker 1: that are a few, you know, two thousand to four
Speaker 1: thousand words long. That's a pretty good long article. But
Speaker 1: then you look for optimist Prime and it has over
Speaker 1: seven thousand words, and you're thinking, wow, optimist Prime must
Speaker 1: have been really important if the Founding Fathers of America
Speaker 1: only warrant two to four thousand words. Yep, yep, Um,
Speaker 1: I mean there is more than meets the eye, So
Speaker 1: I guess there's that. Um. I realized that it's not
Speaker 1: probably technically a wicky, but one of my favorites. Um, well,
Speaker 1: there's the Encyclopedia, which is which is quite entertaining. And
Speaker 1: you know, I like, uh, the Muppet wiki over at
Speaker 1: wikia dot com, which is a hosting site for many
Speaker 1: many wikies. Um, and uh, I don't know that it's
Speaker 1: technically a wicky, but everything to dot com is very
Speaker 1: very like a wiki. If it's not technically considered one,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's actually using one of the wiki platforms.
Speaker 1: But um, those have that that side has many humorous
Speaker 1: uh topics written in there. And to say you would
Speaker 1: never use it as a resource, I mean maybe a
Speaker 1: resource for entertainment, but you know, people are using the
Speaker 1: top the concept you know of of user generated content
Speaker 1: in this environment to uh, you know, for all kinds
Speaker 1: of really good things. And it's just it's fast and
Speaker 1: easy to learn and jump in and contribute to. So
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's a neat idea. Yep. Well, Matt,
Speaker 1: I hope that answers your question. Uh. And and Matt's
Speaker 1: students don't use Wikipedia as a prime source. It's not
Speaker 1: meant for that. Um. But that leads us to our
Speaker 1: second round of listener mail. This comes from Jamal from
Speaker 1: Delray Beach, Florida, and Jamal says, hey, there, Chris and Jonathan.
Speaker 1: My name is Jamal, and I just recently discovered the
Speaker 1: text of podcast and love it. My question is about
Speaker 1: computer processors and hard drives. Until recently, processors and drives
Speaker 1: were increasing in powering capacity at a near exponential rate.
Speaker 1: Hard Drives are currently up to two terabytes and storage
Speaker 1: space and show no signs of slowing down. However, processors
Speaker 1: have stalled at around three point eight giga hurts and
Speaker 1: processing power. To skirt this limitation, CPU manufacturers are introducing
Speaker 1: dual core and quad core processors. I believe there is
Speaker 1: a scientific law that explains how a hard drive or
Speaker 1: CPU would increase in storage capacity or processing power exponentially.
Speaker 1: My question is how do scientists and or manufacturers go
Speaker 1: about increasing hard drive storage space and maintain the small
Speaker 1: size of the hardware. And why have computer processors reached
Speaker 1: the ceiling of three point eight gigga hurts. I hope
Speaker 1: my question makes sense. I only revised it eight times.
Speaker 1: Love the show. And then he goes on to say
Speaker 1: that he remembered the scientific law as Moore's law. So
Speaker 1: Moore's law is not really a scientific law. It's more
Speaker 1: of a self fulfilling prophecy and an observation UM. And
Speaker 1: the observation was that over a given amount of time,
Speaker 1: the number of transistors on a chip would double, And
Speaker 1: that given amount of time has changed over the years
Speaker 1: between twelve months to twenty four months, depending on when
Speaker 1: you're looking at it. UM. In general, the way these
Speaker 1: processing microprocess or plants go as they find new ways
Speaker 1: to create smaller transistors, and then that's that's called a
Speaker 1: tick round. The tick is when you find a new
Speaker 1: way to create smaller transistors. And then the talk round
Speaker 1: would be ways of creating an architecture that maximizes the
Speaker 1: efficiency of those transistors. So TikTok, TikTok, and Uh, the
Speaker 1: Nehalem processor that Intel came out with was a tick round.
Speaker 1: The next one will be a talk around where they
Speaker 1: they maximize the potential of that. Uh, we're getting to
Speaker 1: a limit just because we're getting two transistors that are
Speaker 1: so small that it's there. Another major breakthrough is going
Speaker 1: to have to happen in order to make transistors even
Speaker 1: smaller if we want to fit them on the same
Speaker 1: size chips that we've been using in the past. Um,
Speaker 1: the different cores are a way of kind of getting
Speaker 1: around that. That also requires that we go about a
Speaker 1: different way of programming. And if I'm not mistaken, there's
Speaker 1: a certain point at which the materials inside the processor
Speaker 1: gets so small that electrons begin to leak. Yeah. It
Speaker 1: uses electron tunneling, which is a quantum physics concept. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you can get around that using different materials can
Speaker 1: can limit electron tunneling UM, and it may end up
Speaker 1: being that the next step is to find uh something
Speaker 1: that is um is different from a transistor entirely, which
Speaker 1: sounds crazy, but then you think, well, before transistors, there
Speaker 1: were vacuum tubes. It's not like it's unprecedented. It just
Speaker 1: would require something that we don't have enough knowledge of
Speaker 1: right now to to say this is gonna be it.
Speaker 1: So it may be that we hit a maybe not
Speaker 1: a plateau, but a much slower increase in power over
Speaker 1: the next few years. Doesn't necessarily mean More's law will
Speaker 1: totally go away. Because engineers are brilliant. They find neat
Speaker 1: ways around problems. That's what they do, So uh, I
Speaker 1: would I wouldn't be surprised to see it stretch out
Speaker 1: a little longer UM, although I also have predicted the
Speaker 1: end of Moore's law just like every other gym list
Speaker 1: over the last twenty years. Well thanks a lot, Jamal.
Speaker 1: I hope that answers your question. If any of you
Speaker 1: have questions, write us our email addresses tex stuff at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Chris and I always like
Speaker 1: to hear your comments, and uh go over to the
Speaker 1: website read some stuff about wiki's we got an article
Speaker 1: written there by the site founder Marshall Brain, so check
Speaker 1: that out and we will talk to you again really
Speaker 1: soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure
Speaker 1: to check out the new tech stuff blog now on
Speaker 1: the House stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the
Speaker 1: reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you