RP459

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Requests for adminship and bureaucratship update

No current discussions. Recent RfAs, recent RfBs: (successful, unsuccessful)

Thanks for you offer of help.

Thanks for your comments to Psycano and offer to help newcomers. Although I frequently see inaccuracies, omissions and opportunities for improvement in articles, I rarely add anything to wikipedia any more because seems all that results is attacks and criticisms and undos. Seems like there are these vulture guys just patrolling and looking for fight. I state my point once in an article, but I am not going to go around with anyone about it.

One incident particularly stands out in my mind: an article explaining the principles of lift (as produced by a wing (bird or plane). As a student of physics, and a professional, ATR (Airline Transport Rated) pilot and a flight instructor, I know something about the matter. As I was becoming a pilot, I ran into a lot of erroneous information about basic lift. I eventually developed visual demos of the process of lift and stall using sand (for static time shot) and water for a dynamic view of lift in operation by watching the wave patterns.

The WP article gave a poor explanation of the aerodynamics and physics of lift, and was poorly edited grammatically. The author's understand of life was fuzzy: either not a pilot at all, or very low time. Basic lift is not a complicated phenomon and is easily explained. I simply corrected the article to a simple and elegant explanation of lift (subsonic lift, that is; supersonic gets complicated).

The next day I got a incensed attack on myself for changing the article (not on the science of what I changed, but against me personally) and found it all changed back exactly as it was. I stronly suspect the value of what I wrote was not even considered;  I got the impression I had violated somebody's personal turf.    

I wonder how many people are out there with good contributions to make to WP, but whom are driven off by such vulture guards. Another case I remember involved Artic Silver. The page is almost a advertising brochure for this brand name and heavily advertized CPU cooling paste. I personally tested Artic Silver against an ordinary paste (under exactly the same conditions on the same machine) and found that the Artic Silver less than 1 degree cooler (not a significant difference for a CPU, nor fo a product that costs 10 more than ordinary paste). I simply added this information in. Again, somebody went ballistic about it, bitched me out and change it back -- leaving me the suspicion that he worked for Artic Silver.

Anyway, that for the offer and thanks for work on the WP. For all its deficiencies, it is still a splendid read.

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