[conspire] Wikipedia editing suckitude; the art of checklists

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

You all complain, but it's not easy.

http://backreaction.blogspot.it/2017/03/academia-is-fucked-up-so-why-isnt.html

Should we give up do science? Should we close wikipedia?
Should we distrust wikipedia or science?

I recently read an article in Italian that talk about anti-vaxxers[1].

Roughly it says they are middle class and they should have access to the 
tools to build up an informed opinion.

For me it is absolutely clear what herd immunity is and I've no doubt 
vaccines have an historical successful record.
But I'm not a doctor! Am I qualified to draw this conclusions? Why or 
why not?

Nevertheless I do believe media and even experts lies and there are real 
conspiracies oh!

I think the usefulness of Occam's razor has been excessively simplified ;)

BTW Rick, feel responsible for making me waste some more time to try 
again to replace fetchmail.


[1] https://www.vice.com/it/article/chi-sono-antivaccinisti-italiani

On 04/17/2017 12:11 AM, Paul Zander wrote:
> This aligns with a story I heard (NPR?) a couple of years ago.  The
> subject was some incident during the Civil War.  It was commonly
> accepted that what happened was "A".  However a history professor had
> researched the subject in depth and concluded "B".  This was based on
> contemporary newspaper articles.
>
> He edited Wikipedia.  His edits were undone. Lots of back and forth.
> Wikipedia had a preference for secondary sources (history books
> published long afterwards, but widely available) and rejected the
> primary source because the original newspaper articles were not
> available online.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> *To:* conspire at linuxmafia.com
> *Sent:* Sunday, April 16, 2017 10:43 AM
> *Subject:* [conspire] Wikipedia editing suckitude; the art of checklists
>
> Remember: a well-debugged checklist will save your life.
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com
> <mailto:rick at linuxmafia.com>> -----
>
> Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2017 23:50:49 -0700
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com <mailto:rick at linuxmafia.com>>
> To: Kevin W Enns <kwenns at gmail.com <mailto:kwenns at gmail.com>>
> Subject: Re: [skeptic] And see, this is why he makes the big bucks...
> Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.
>
> I wrote:
>
>> BTW, the things you learn from reading NTSB disaster reports!  I'd
>> somehow assumed Dad had been a longtime captain, but the disaster report
>> on the crash that killed him in December 1968 said he'd been rated for
>> full captain status only in June 1967, in the middle of our stay in
>> Victoria, Hong Kong.
>
> Around the time I was writing that, I was doing a low-key corrective
> edit of this Wikipedia passage:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmendorf_Air_Force_Base#Aviation_accidents
>
> Over the years, there have been several mentions on Wikipedia of the Pan
> Am flight 799 disaster that killed my father, and they've all had the
> same appalling problem:  The clumsy editing and writing always ends up
> blaming the pilots:  The Wikipedians always boil it down to 'Crew
> attempted a no-flaps takeoff', which makes them sound like a trio of
> idiots who incompetently killed themselves and a $5M airframe.
>
> And they do this while linking directly to the NTSB report, which means
> they _don't fscking read it_.  The report goes out of its way to say it
> wasn't the pilots' fault.[1]
>
> This is a sore point with me and with anyone who grew up in an airline
> family, because it's notorious that the airline, the airframe
> manufacturer, and even the press tends to _immediately_ jump the gun
> after almost any fatal air crash and _blame the pilots_.  'Must have been
> pilot error', we hear.  Why _not_ blame them?  They're dead and can't sue,
> so who cares if everyone casually defames them?
>
> _So_ tired of that.
>
> I have to be extremely low-key about my Wikipedia editing, though,
> because if my personal connection is known or suspected, there could be
> a huge backlash.  The justification for this is their mania for NPOV
> (neutral point of view), but functionally (IMO) it's hauled out by
> Wikipedia regulars mostly as a passive-aggressive way to fend off
> non-regulars with inconvenient expertise.
>
> So, I edit without logging in, and try hard not to get the regulars'
> backs up.
>
> Around late 2004, a Wikipedia article about my friend Eric S. Raymond,
> a rather flamboyant (and, to be fair, self-promoting) member of the open
> source community, had been turned into a rather appalling hatchet job
> pretty much devoted to attacking him personally, citing as the 'neutral'
> source an extremely dubious, scurrilous free-hosted Web page
> (http://esr.1accesshost.com/) that for some years had been maintained
> elsewhere by anonymous parties who dislike Eric in order to ridicule
> him.  Eric made the mistake of directly attempting to edit and correct
> the Wikipedia page under his own name as the editing login -- and
> immediately ran into a buzzsaw of Wikipedians saying he was not allowed
> to make the article cease sucking, because he wasn't 'neutral'.  So, his
> edits were reverted(!), even though he amply explained them.  At that
> time, in particular, the Wikipedians would rather reject corrections
> from an expert and keep a terrible page if the expert knew too much
> because, y'know, nobody knows more about that particular subject, being
> a primary source, but isn't 'neutral' so we mustn't listen.
>
> I drew the appropriate lessons, and, not long afterwards when someone
> created a page about me, rather than try to improve it, I invoked
> Wikipedia's non-urgent process for deleting the page, which got done
> about a month later.
>
> Ironically, what ended use of the http://esr.1accesshost.com/
> <http://esr.1accesshost.com/>page as a
> primary source was it being cited by one of its propenents, one Jim
> Thompson, on my 'Conspire' Linux user group mailing list in California,
> in reply to which I debunked the factual claims cited from that page,
> even to Thompson's satisfaction.  Afterwards, Wikipedians were able to
> reference my mailing list discussion as a reliable external authority to
> fix the page about Eric.  So, they were willing to accept better
> information about Eric from me, but not from Eric.  Weird.
>
> (Since that time, Wikipedia has mostly cleaned up its act, getting
> serious about enforcing its Biography of Living Persons policy and
> disallowing use of Wikipedia for personal hatchet jobs.)
>
>
> There is also at least one other Wikipedia page that includes the Pan Am
> crash, that I _also_ had to delicately fix some years ago -- same
> serious problem -- but I can't find it at the moment.
>
>
> Here's a weird thing:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_707#1960s
> and
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft#1968
> have nothing about the crash.  Can you guess why?
>
> It's because _even though_ those purport to be comprehensive lists, no
> additions are permitted (to flesh out the lists) unless each links to
> a full Wikipedia page about the disaster.  Because nobody has yet made a
> page about Pan Am flight 799, it remains nearly absent.
>
> Of course, I _could_ create a
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_799
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_799>page from scratch and
> make it scrupulously match the NTSB report and several classic books
> that extensively cover it as a key case study.  I'm almost willing to try.
> That would be a fairly high-profile edit, however, and might attract
> attention.  (Articles that are too substantive also start getting
> complaints about violations of the 'No original research' rule, even if
> scrupulously referenced.)
>
>
>
> [1] Among the many things you'll never learn from the lamentably bad
> discussion of this crash most places on the Web (including Wikipedia) is
> that the flight 799 disaster (eventually) brought about a revolution in
> human-factors research for both the airline industry and others, and
> forced rethinking about the way checklists are used.  In a real way, the
> sad lessons learned from studying this crash have saved countless lives
> (later).  (But it took more checklist-related deaths and 18 more years
> before NTSB prompted FAA to convence a research group to improve
> checklist design.)
> See:  https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/m/profile/adegani/Cockpit%20Checklists.pdf
> http://lessonslearned.faa.gov/Northwest255/Review%20of%20Takeoff%20Configuration%20Warning%20Systems%20on%20Large%20Jet%20Transports.pdf
>
> In its mid-1969 report on the crash, NTSB identified as critical
> causative factors (a) a fatal flaw in the preflight checklists that
> interacted catastrophically with (b) an unfixed hardware defect in a
> crucial warning system.  The warning system was a horn designed to sound
> if the pilots apply takeoff thrust and any of several control structures
> including the flaps aren't set right for takeoff.
>
> First Officer Johannes Markestein, following the taxi phase of the
> checklist as they rolled away from the gate, lowered (set) the flaps to
> the correct 14 degrees for takeoff.  (There are separate checklists for
> each successive phase of takeoff:  'BEFORE START' at the closing of the
> passenger doors, 'TAXI' after receiving the taxi clearance, 'BEFORE
> TAKEOFF' to be completed by reaching the hold line before the runway,
> etc.) However, then Captain Arthur Moen, following verbatim requirements
> of the cold weather operations section of the Pan Am aircraft operations
> manual, which says flaps in cold weather conditions (like Anchorage, AK
> in late December at 6am) should be left _up_ (retracted) until lineup
> for takeoff, in order to reduce the chance of snow or ice wedging the
> flap screws into extended position or lodge between the flap and the
> wing edge, did so.
>
> Captain Moen immediately discussed his having done so with Markestein.
> Markestein replied 'OK, let's not forget them.'  But there was no
> post-taxi checklist item to -recheck- flaps before takeoff.  The
> checklists in use made the brittle, often-untrue assumption that there
> would have been no reason to touch the flaps after setting the to 14
> degrees after taxi phase.  In fact, as NTSB pointed out in a subsequent
> special report, the checklists' assumptions were easily invalidated by
> any number of unplanned events or interruptions as the crew runs through
> them.
>
> And this is where the poorly debugged checklists interacted
> catastrophically with the jet's hardware defect.  This was the 'takeoff
> warning system', which is intended to sound a loud horn if pilots apply
> takeoff thrust with either flaps, speed brakes, or the stabilizer
> (vertical tail) are in the wrong position for takeoff.  As this was in
> the primitive era of electronics, application of takeoff thrust was
> detected by a mechanical linkage to the thrust lever.  If it were
> advanced to 42 degrees of angle, then the checks of those three systems
> would be triggered and a horn go off if they weren't set right.
>
> And this is where there's a subtle physics problem.  Boeing had done
> testing two years before, and found that if the ambient air were really
> cold -- like Anchorage, AK in late December at 6:15 am -- triggering
> wouldn't occur, and sent out a bulletin recommending that the actuator
> be changed from 42 degrees to 25 degrees.
>
> And why would cold weather cause this?  (My surmise:)  Because cold air
> is denser, and provides more lift, hence you get takeoff thrust without
> the thrust lever being pushed as far forward.  Boeing didn't indicate
> any special urgency, and completely failed to define what it meant when
> it said this would be a problem in 'cold weather operations'.
>
> It was about 1 degree F, that day in December, 1968.
>
> For its part, Pan Am decided to not bother implementing the recommended
> fix even though it would have cost less than $50 per plane:  Some
> unnamed engineer in Pan Am service engineering 'decided the modification
> was not necessary'.  An equally unnamed supervisor reviewed this
> decision and 'decided, after coordination with flight operations, that
> the bulleting was not applicable to Pan Am aircraft, and no further
> action was taken.  The reason for this decision was not fully
> documented.'  Great job, guys!
>
> So, First Officer Markestein had said 'OK, let's not forget them', but
> they were following procedure by working scrupulously through the
> checklists, and nothing there said anything about the flaps.  The flight
> was cleared for takeoff, and Markestein applied takeoff thrust --
> advancing the thrust lever, but not to 42 degrees on account of the cold
> air.  They rose, but started having trouble maintaining attitude control
> and remaining above stall speed.  Doubtless they started working through
> the emergency checklists, which unfortunately were written with the
> assumption that the takeoff warning system was functional.  And, problem
> is, the crew didn't have enough time to uncover the broken-checklists
> problem.  They had exactly 59.2 seconds before the plane hit the ground
> at 187 knots (215 MPH).  The broken checklist and the broken warning
> system conspired against them, and they didn't find the problem in time.
>
> And all of that gets boiled down by Wikipedians to 'Crew attempted
> a no-flaps takeoff'.
>
> _So_ tired of that.
>
> (I have a running gag with Deirdre every time we fly together, whereby
> one of us needs to check out the window before takeoff to ensure 14
> degrees flaps.)
>
> I need a drink after writing that.
>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
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-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it http://www.borgonovo.net