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Tue, 22 Jul 2008

Wikipedia: WRONG AGAIN

Wikipedia has a reputation for being of rather low quality, particularly in the humanities. In the sciences and technology it is supposed to be pretty good. But today, I found an error in their article about ... the triangle. One of the most basic mathematical concepts. And they got it wrong. Joy.

OK, to be fair, it's only subtlely wrong, is correct for the majority of cases, and one could argue that the context in which the inaccurate information is presented makes it OK. But I disagree.

In a section called "Basic facts" they first mention that triangles were described thoroughly by Euclid. Good. In the next paragraph, they say that the internal angles add up to 180°. Not so good. They only do so in some spaces, the most commonly known of which is the Euclidean space. Anyway [click click click type click] I've fixed it now. I wonder how long it'll stay fixed, or whether some wanker will revert my pedantry.

Posted at 00:31 by David Cantrell
keywords: geeky | maths | web
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