Productivity aid

Statisticians of a certain age will recognise the ease with which one can slip from actually looking at statistics to just producing lots of statistics. Computers being part of the mix here, with it now being easy to produce complicated analyses of large datasets with very little time or effort: I remember once, maybe twenty years ago now, being very struck that I could use interactive SQL to produce an analysis from a table containing getting on for a million rows in just a few seconds, certainly less than ten. However, production seems to trump consumption in that despite the apparent productivity gain, it is all to easy to spend one's day just pumping out statistics unseen.

More recently, when I am preparing a précis of a paper that I am reading - perhaps about the reindeer of reference 1 - I have taken to using Wikipedia to tell me about the words and phrases that I don't understand that I come across along the way - and it rarely fails me. However, rather as with the statistics, it is all to easy to paste the top of the Wikipedia entry into my précis without bothering to read it very carefully, perhaps not really reading it at all. So while the précis may be going forward, at least after a fashion, my comprehension of the paper, which, after all, is the main point of the exercise, is not.

Then yesterday, quite unsolicited, Microsoft offered me something to add into Word, a something which appeared to do copy and paste from Wikipedia automatically. Perhaps whenever Cortana detected a long word or perhaps whenever I hit out some control sequence. To which my response was that this would probably aggravate rather than mitigate the problem just mentioned, so declined. At least for the present, at least while decline is an option.

Are Microsoft trying to muscle into the Wikipedia Foundation under cover of offerings of free help and support? Do they see a revenue opportunity which ought to be harvested? I very much hope not.

PS: maybe I should check what relation précis has to precise. I dare say that it has one, but as I type, it does not come to mind.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/reindeer.html.