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Just like the Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta, The Wikipedia is going the way of the dinosaur. It’s being replaced by casual and structured prompts to the AIs. Anyone who wants to can tap into the gargantuan Large Language Models and ask a question about anything – with references. Who needs Wikipedians for volunteers scampering around with AI research assistants when they can look up the information directly? #cutoutthemiddleman
The problem is exacerbated by the human frailties of the Wikipedia “contributors”. What if they have particular beliefs or a particular agenda that blinds them to bodies of science and science textbooks? A case in point is the Wikipedia page for Hexagonal Water:
The authors then equivocate Hexagonal Water to the dihydrogen monoxide parody – a fictitious labeling for water created by a witty 14-year-old as a “science project” survey in 1997.
Is Hexagonal Water really equivalent to “dihydrogen monoxide” survey? They’re not even remotely comparable. The science book The Fourth Phase of Water was published in 2013. The textbook has a 4.8 star rating on Amazon (751 reviews). It was written by tenured UW Professor Gerald H Pollack. Included in the reviewers is one by tenured Professor Vijay P. Singh of Texas A&M University. This review was published in the science journal Journal of Hydrologic Engineering (Volume 20, Issue 2 https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)HE.1943-5584.0001133). The comparison to a 14-year-old’s survey about the “dangers” of his concocted name of “dihydrogen monoxide” is laughable. It says far more about the hallucinations of the Wikipedia that this article makes that preposterous claim. Pollack’s book is a real live science book – it’s not marketing for anything.
Another problem is the technical claims of the article. It says that some hypothetical EZ would only exist for femtoseconds. That doesn’t reconcile what Pollack describes in his book and published science papers. The charge separation of the EZ exists for as long as there is a source to power it up. Typically, that’s sunlight or infrared lighting. Electrically, the EZ behaves like a capacitor. Like a capacitor, the stored charge will eventually dissipate.
The Wikipedia is NOT the place to make some scientific conclusion. If there is some error in the published claims of Professor Pollack’s team (and others), someone should be able to say what that claim is, where it is stated, and how they know the falsifiable claim is in fact false.
I don’t want to get any farther into the weeds of this particular entry – unless someone has questions or they think someone has “proven” the Exclusion Zone to be false. It’s certainly not the only example of a totally bogus Wikipedia article. I like this example because it’s an apolitical example of the Wikipedia’s failings. I can give other examples if desired.
Anyone who wants to know about the Exclusion Zone of the Fourth Phase of Water would be far better off asking an AI. You will get a far better writeup than the silly dihydrogen dismissal from the biased wikipedians. Here’s an example of what an AI has to say.