Hoofed crocodiles! And thoughts on AI and online sources for independent research.

[cab67]

5. It's the enthusiasts I mentioned.

A lot of people are drawn to extinct animals - especially dinosaurs. But while many are good at memorizing details, they don't have the expertise to really explain them.

It's like learning to write by memorizing words from a dictionary. Sure, you've got a big vocabulary, and that's good, but verb tenses? Sentence structure? Paragraphs? Without those, you can't write your way out of a paper bag.

(It's mostly not alligators, for what it's worth.)

This can happen whenever there's a group of people who really like a subject, but who aren't really experts on it. Or if it's something that isn't really controversial except for a handful of nut jobs, and the nut jobs are the people who take charge. That's what happened with the Amanda Knox page. It's been an ongoing problem for wikipedia pages on many subjects - vaccines, various conspiracy theories, evolution, and so on - they have to be monitored frequently and consistently to remove the crackpottery that people try to add all the time.

Sometimes, the histories and discussions linked to a page can be highly entertaining.