The problem is, how to separate "Fact" and "Opinion".

Example:
Its a fact 240vac can kill you.
Its my opinion VAWT's are usefull.

Now someone else may dissagree with passion with my last statement, so it cant be stated as "fact", but "opinion".

I would be for banning certain members of the 'community'. In a real community one can see the pile of beer cans and empty whiskey bottles or smell the smoke. Here, one can only read.

The ignorant are at a distinct advantage if they are trying to learn.

The ignorant are at a distinct advantage if they are spouting manure as few will challenge. Those who do challenge will be as likely be attacked quicker than the purveyor of manure.

I figure this 'hobby' is expensive and dangerous enough without stupid and maybe dangerous 'factoids' that are unchallenged.

This goes for the political end too. How many have researched enough to determine if the 'carbon trading' is a scam or a great idea .... HINT AlGore 'advised' his father on the Interstate highway system, invented the  Internet and believes so much in carbon credits he purchases them himself (and from himself).

I could rant for days and be left in a daze .....

Now when it comes to some sort of safety discussion about towers ,,dangling pieces of steel piping ,guy anchors , you know ,,where little ,or big kids, can get hurt , then thats when I ,sort of offer an opinion..

This is a friendly forum and lots of us are just ordinary folk tinkering about in our workshop trying to get a windmill up or a cicuit to work. And ,hey , some of us are afraid to ask questions ,because the big bad wolf will pounce-you know the ,the buggers that have never done anything ,but know everything...Sorry..

Anyhow, I'm all for safety and keeping the forum a very nice and safe place where we can generate(pun) a good feeling within us and learn from each other.

If you get pissed off with a posting ,,let it go , move on and think that you are correct or he is correct and be with it ..

I talk to a lot of the 'posters" everyday on the "IRC" ,we discuss things relevant to fieldlines,Thebackshed .They are all friendly,come and join us ..
But most of all take advice from the guys that know,and play safe..

As someone who has been playing with wind power for nearly 60 years I have seen wonderful advances in the last few years, mainly brought about by sharing of ideas on the internet. For about 50 years I was working alone and probably working on similar lines to many others and we probably made the same mistakes and learned from them.

In the old days the only chance we had was to read all the available material, which was very limited, and try to think why machines designed for other uses weren't always very suitable for wind power.

The down side of the internet as I see it is that everyone can become an expert over night, which is fine if based on the useful information but not so good if based on silly ideas.

Probably the thing that worries me most is nothing to do with the internet but a serious lack of basic understanding of how things work in general. I can only comment from what I see around me and it may be local to the UK but modern education is not giving the younger generation a fair chance. Fundamentals are not taught in school and without them it may be perfectly possible to pass exams with multiple choice questions but it doesn't equip you to think about basic things in a sensible way.

If you have a basic understanding of principles it is much easier to sort out useful information from crap. That is the starting point with the internet and it is wise to do a fair bit of research before believing anything on a discussion forum. There is plenty of information that is fact if you look on the right sites ( even Wikipedia can be wrong). When you move over to other sites you may be dealing with someone trying to promote their ideas or products or someone genuinely offering advice but which happens to be wrong.

I see many things here that are blatantly wrong, confusing or in many cases dangerous but I am often accused of being negative so I don't in general make much comment unless it is in direct reply to someone and if I can save them wasted time and effort by going down a blind route I sometimes make it fairly obvious that it is going nowhere. I have tried too many of these things and wasted time on them to encourage others to follow that line and waste their time as well.

If it is a new line of attack that I haven't tried I tend to keep an open mind and follow the discussion and see which way it is leading and if it looks promising enough I may even do some trials to get a better understanding.

Those who want to succeed with wind power have two choices, study the subject properly and learn what works and what doesn't or take the simple way and stick to something that works ( plenty from the Dans & Hugh Piggott and many reliable contributors here and on a few other sites) and build it as designed without modification.

There seems an awful lot of people that have no basic understanding that want to take someone else's design and modify it. This can only be done when you have lots of experience, it will take time to see what even a minor change can do and really mess things up.

I normally keep clear of these rants and perhaps it may have been better if I kept clear of this one but it might explain why I sometimes come down hard on someone's idea when I have wasted time on that approach in the past.

I can see nothing wrong with people posting things that are wrong/incorrect on this or other forums. Invariably it leads to a discussion where it gets cleared up, and in most cases we all learn something from it.... far more than if the discussion had not appeared in the first place.

Forums are generally great places for this interaction to occur, as it occurs no where else.

What is truth anyway.  I have seen not one fact/truth used in the global warming debate that would give it's assumptions any basis in fact........ so we skip getting the assumptions correct, and move on the the ramifications and fear and horror based in solid extrapolations of flimsy one off anomalous events, which when combined with wizardly statistical analysis, proves any thing we need it to prove...and absolutely beyond reasonable doubt.... and fully and dutifully reported by these scientifically challenged reporters. I have yet to see any critical comment or questions.

Example of recent truth:
Recently I have seen (on the news) the Herd Island group of islands being swallowed up and separated by rising sea levels... complete with aerial photographic proof.... (I think they may have confused storm damage on a joining sand spit with rising sea levels...I live by the sea, and my island seems to have missed out on this event)... and reported as scientific fact.... and with a straight face and concerned voice.

Ice shelf break-offs with all of the experts giving their dire predictions..... only to find the following week, that the Australian antartic division reported that ice load is actually increasing, not decreasing as it was supposed to be the week before.....(Those boys will lose their funding, or be forced to recant) http://bigpondnews.com/articles/Environment/2009/04/18/Study_says_Antarctica_growing_323242.html
I have no doubt that the greens among us will see this as proving their case?????

It is all based on the sloppiest  science the world has recently witnessed..... But that is how the world works at the moment. facts are out fear is in.

A whole raft of truths is based on nix..... where do you start.

The best you can hope for is informed discussion. In most forum on "real things", this is generally enough to get to the bottom of their subject. I have (as you know) a myriad of questions regarding power factor and it's effects on systems. I read with interest on the EDM forums (the power engineers seem to hang there), and on a simple discussion regarding cfls and power factor, there were lots of replies from lots of engineers who worked with this stuff all their careers... making plain wrong/stupid statements.... in about 80% of the replies.

It fell to only a few people  to straighten out the rest.... so  lots of engineers obviously gained from their wrong statements..... it works in real life, and is the best you can hope for.

The exact same thing has and does happen here. There are lots of aspects that most of us sort of understand, but when push comes to shove, I bet the majority will get it wrong if they have to expound their ideas of complex interactions specifically, and not generally, and back up their statements with hard facts and examples, so that others can easily see where they have/haven't gone wrong. Perfect example of this was the discussion on back to back electro's on backshed.... experts and engineers do not have a mortgage on fact.... sometimes the village idiot gets it right.

With theological dogma, we see sweeping motherhood statements, which everyone nods sagely too.... but not a provable fact in sight (includes the green movement). But much enthusiasm and self aggrandizement is achieved, and they are all happy with their various "truths".

If you see something that you feel is wrong say so. The replies are here forever as well as the statements.... Hopefully, in an open discussion, the truth will finally come out on whatever is discussed on practical subjects.

We will leave the respective truths for the political and dogmatic subjects to different forums, where the lack of a result makes no difference to anyones opinion anyway.

Todays world rewards sensationalism, and refuses to fund real research....

It's no surprise that facts are yesterdays headlines.

It aint broke so don't try to fix it... thats what the guberment are there to do.

In my expereience people who take everything at face value normally learn the hard way weather you tell them or not.

Its nice of others to correct or make the general forum aware of bad practise but it is someone trying to pass on experience, most of the time it is not asked for by the original poster so they will be less prepared to listen.

The 'told you so' h&s world we now live in should keep out of the internet in my opinion.

I like to stick to fact but we are all only human.
Jon M

Another side is to simply, administratively remove a post, post at comment, ban the user, move the post to yet another heading or, no doubt, one of many other options to call attention to it's invalidity. But is that a good idea?

I have to believe that all of us get caught by the "lack of knowledge" bug, especially me and I'd sure hate to get removed or banned for a "stupid or perhaps foolish" post of a question or comment. I'd hope that you good people would take the time to set me on the path to knowledge, as you have many times, and not ban me.

NOW THEN, on yet another hand #3, LOL, there should be times IMHO when posts that are of an obvious commercial, misleading or otherwise clearly detrimental nature need to be called to task. But rather than ban, remove, or whatever , allow for posters to opinion-ize the heck out of it with counter points that are valid and do it in a manner that is "clear". Clear meaning to call the bad post what it is, not just flavor it as iffy or questionable, call it trash or whatever. Make it clear what the REAL thing or issue of the post is so that all get the reasonable answer, so to speak.

1. if someone posts something that clearly could lead to either him or someone
else being hurt or killed, that should be dealt with straight up. to do other is a
sin of omission in my books, and if you know better and don't step up and someone gets hurt, well... maybe some of the blood is on your hands too?

2. i too have seen some faulty logic, twisted facts, and wild assertions
and somedays it gets tiring to respond to each and ever one, it is easy to tell from the responses some of these posts get from the moderators and those in the know.

so how about this?

why not have another heading to send a post to until it has been proven?

for instance someone makes a claim about a process that while it is not overunity, the results are quite a stretch over those that are typical. so what do you do with this?  lock or delete without giving the OP a chance to prove out his assertion?
might be better to just move it to a section called "unproven" or "theoretical" or
"needs analysis" or something less combative that just locking or removing.

i realize that this section might turn into quite a mess, but what else do you do?

seems like i have seen several topics get whacked when perhaps there might have been something to be learned that might have related to the question in some other less direct way.

just rambling

I'm pretty sure I haven't gone so far as to want to visit them with my 45lb double recurve or anything like that.

This "it's on the 'net so it must be true, will die a slow death", the skeptic in all of us will help it die. Think Snopes.c...

Allowing people to be wrong from your point of view and explaining it in a calm clear way is what I like to see.
Plus we can't learn if we don't make misteaks.

People like Hugh,Flux, Ghurd, Windstuff Ed,and the DANs, carry a lots of respect from me due to huge amount of information and help they give.

One thing I would like to see, but know that can't be done would be to edit a schematic that is wrong. I've put one up and I'd sure like to be able to either delete or edit it :0.
For others who seem to take offense or are quick tempered: then maybe some de-caff coffee,, take a walk, go play, something other posting that could lead to embarrassment later.
For those who post with hate/meanness involved, there's a timeout corner....maybe?

I was taught along time ago this: Opinions are like arse's everyone's got one...

Keep Smiling
Bruce S

I hope everyone knows that you can never thrust the information from someone who want to sell something or who depend in some way on some kind of the business he's talking about.
Simple to say but these things are not allways visible.So never thrust any information blindly.

Ok,enough stuff for a long dissertation.Just one thing I remarked on this site.
If some post that presents some information that's not favorable to solar electricity
gets deleted instead of being discussed,because the moderators don't want to discourage  
readers from going solar,is this the right track to information?

I also don't want my news censored by someone elses opinion of what is so and what is not.  

If I read a posting that seems dangerous or reckless, I will likely respond indicating my opinion of it as such, however, ultimately it should be the responsibility of the experimenter to determine if what they are doing is safe.