leah blogs

June 2005

22jun2005 · Wikipedia Discrepancies

I know the following rant really is of no use, and that you better fix “Open Source” projects on your own instead of complaining, but I lack the knowledge to do that… maybe someone else wants to do it?

Recently, I had to prepare a presentation about Bayes’ Theorem and conditional probabilities. Therefore, I looked at these pages: Bayes-Theorem, Bayesscher Wahrscheinlichkeitsbegriff, and Bedingte Wahrscheinlichkeit. And, believe it or now, they all use different notations! What’s that?

Now, I needed to figure how to write p(A and B). One page says that’s p(A and B), another uses p(A & B). Same for negation. One page uses ¬A, one A̅ and I’ve seen !A too (but I know that that is wrong). A person profound in maths I asked says it actually is AC (and that’s what the english version of the page says). So what?

Whom should I trust and what should I believe? And what if we actually learned it totally different in school (if I could only remember…)?

It probably doesn’t matter—after all, the audience has even less clue than I do. But it would be nice to do things right, you know? And it would be nice to have a free and open encyclopedia that doesn’t dissent itself.

NP: Jimi Hendrix—Come On (Let The Good Times Roll)

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