Probably because it's not merely destruction but creation with volume.
As a wikipedia reader I guess I have the luxury to laugh about it knowing stuff like this is eventually discovered and corrected
"Wikipedia is like an old and eccentric uncle. He can be a lot of fun—over the years he's seen a lot, and he can tell a great story. He's also no dummy; he's accumulated a lot of information and has some strong opinions about what he's gathered. You can learn quite a bit from him. But take everything he says with a grain of salt. A lot of the things he thinks he knows for sure aren't quite right, or are taken out of context. And when it comes down to it, sometimes he believes things that are a little bit, well, nuts. If it ever matters to you whether something he said is real or fictional, it's crucial to check it out with a more reliable source."
—Charles Seife, Virtual Unreality, Appendix, "The top ten dicta of the internet skeptic", Dictum no. 1.
Charles Seife describes my feeling about every scientific or journalistic text I read.
What he does not describe is my disability to understand most topics good enough to find out if a source is reliable or not. That a paper got into a famous money-making journal certainly is not a guarantee for reliability.
I didn't think reliable was gradable. Conversely, singular a + more usualy commanding plural agreement is two juxtaposed determiners selling one off as adverb.
Why not suggest instead to check more reliable sources. Would that sound too diminishing, and an indefinite determiner is added as buffer?
Well, if I tried learning linguistics only from Wikipedia I won't ever find out.
Controversial, but I largely disagree. I don’t think I’ve ever read the wiki page on something I’m an expert on and found any inaccuracies that weren’t due to advances in the last couple of years.
I am only asking because I understand that most of the higher mathematics pages on Wikipedia are written by actual mathematicians – and pretty much unreadable to anyone who is not a mathematician and already fully conversant with the topics concerned.
Math as structural science is tangential in [[almost-all]] cases.
Maths inasmuch as WP can cover it surely didn't make heaps advances in the last decades, except perhaps in the pedagogy department (that I can source, but it is literally decades) and category theory to give the whole thing structure (also pretty much cut and dried as soon as Bourbaki, I believe, though reception may take a while).
I have a herd of elephants. I decide one day I get them all really really well fed, and then lead them to the marketplace where they then take a really really big dump on the stalls and the produce and the sellers and the customers. In the end, everything and everyone is just covered, and people are walking knee-deep in elephant poo.
That's not merely destruction but creation with volume.
