Well this is fascinating, and very disturbing …

Real science and real people, yes “experts”, are now being attacked by faceless and anonymous “editors” of Wikipedia, for many and various reasons. Someone who’s writing is well respected, but happens to dispute the relevance of “the cholesterol hypothesis” in causing Coronary Heart Disease has just posted that his entry has been removed …

http://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2018/12/18/wikipedia-a-parable-for-our-times/

When you go to Wikipedia to try and find out what’s been happening, you can land here …

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Malcolm_Kendrick

… and you discover the most spurious reasoning behind editorial decision making, where opinion scores higher than fact. If you shout loud enough, and often enough, your opinion counts. Kendrick who never even created his entry, which was biographical, rather than promoting his views, has been removed.

With that information at my disposal, I will now dispose of Wikipedia – they have had the last financial contribution from me!

Paying for software services

In a recent post on another blog – Thought grazing – I wrote about the belief I had been moving towards that perhaps it was time to consider paying for software services that I’d grown to rely on. This was in the context of Google+ being “sunsetted” and the change in entitlements with Flickr that had encouraged me to move to take a Pro membership. That means that I now am paying for the following services – LastPass, iCloud, Google Drive, Vimeo, Flickr, the Adobe Photography Programme and of course my web hosting. These are all services that are core to my personal IT needs, so if I need them, I shouldn’t mind paying for them.

But now, another set of issues has emerged. Out of nowhere, I can’t remember any notification of forthcoming changes, I found that my Feedly account was not working the way it used to. I couldn’t save articles to Pocket as I’d done before, so my whole web reading and bookmarking strategy was in jeopardy. I had to consider – do I look for a different RSS reader, or do I pay-up to stay with what I’ve relied upon for a number of years – in fact all the years since Google Reader was “sunsetted” – note what a nuisance Google can be with their “free” services! Whilst at it, and to anticipate what might be just a little way down the road, I decided to subscribe to Feedly Pro AND Pocket Premium. Hopefully an increase in subscription income for the two of them will provide some security to two services that I really do rely on!

I think I’m now fully covered because I really don’t see Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Photos becoming subscription services … do you?