CHASE: Global Warming and Wikipedia

Last Tuesday’s CHASE meeting was the best that I’ve attended. And the first given by someone with a blog. Which means it’s a bit easier for me to talk about it because I can just provide a link to his write-up of the event.

William Connolley’s presentation was split into two topics. First off he talked about climate change, which is something he’s involved with professionally as a climate modeller; and then moved on to discuss Wikipedia, where his work as an “admin” is done in his spare time.

It was refreshing and interesting to hear someone talking about global warming without the usual emotionally-charged doom-and-gloom or “there’s nothing to worry about” attitude. Lots of graphs showing a variety of possible predictions, from the optimistic to the pessimistic, which he did a good job of explaining. I’d recommend having a look through the presentation slides which are available at the above link (unfortunately you’ll need OpenOffice to read it, but as I found out the other day, that isn’t too terrible an install. Shame they don’t provide a viewer in the same way that PowerPoint does)

The Wikipedia section of his talk contained less information that I didn’t know, but I still learnt quite a bit about the structure of the community and some of the details of how they prevent it from degenerating into a loop of opposing factions deleting each other’s content. And it’s an area that William has some knowledge of, given that one of the pages he’s contributed to most is the one on global warming.