Stanford's Authoritative Alternative To Wikipedia 355
eldavojohn writes "For decades, Stanford has been working on a different kind of Wikipedia. It might even be considered closer to a peer-reviewed journal, since you have get submissions past a 120 person group of leading philosophers around the world, not to mention Stanford's administration. It has several layers of approval, but the authoritative model produces high quality content — even if it only amounts to 1,200 articles. Content you can read straight through to find everything pertinent — not hop around following link after link like the regular Wikipedia. You might question the need for this, but one of the originators says, 'Our model is authoritative. [Wikipedia's] model is one an academic isn't going to be attracted to. If you are a young academic, who might spend six months preparing a great article on Thomas Aquinas, you're not going to publish in a place where anyone can come along and change this.' The site has articles covering topics from Quantum Computing to technical luminaries like Kurt Friedrich Gödel and Alan Turing. The principal editor said, 'It's the natural thing to do. I'm surprised no one is doing it for the other disciplines.'"
Re:Academics (Score:5, Interesting)
Silly article spin (Score:4, Interesting)
There's room for -- and need for -- both this sort of site *and* for Wikipedia or something like it.
The article wants to cast this as some sort of competition, and tie into existing anti-wikipedia bias, but there's no particular reason that this is actually a zero-sum game.
In fact, Wikipedia's strength is partly in its policy of _never_ being authoritative. You want that, you follow the citations. And this is a great example of a site that Wikipedia can refer to.
Re:tags are correct (Score:3, Interesting)
I think they might stand a chance at survival if they made it work similarly to Slashdot's own comment rating/reading system. So normal/anonymous users would browse as +5 or something (meaning completely peer reviewed) and for others who opt into it, might be able to view at lower levels like "-1" or something like that.
Peer review processes like these will not move quickly. By making it available prior to review completion, people might be able to see something more interesting even if it's not completely accepted yet at the time.
Re:tags are correct (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The readability seems to be questionable. (Score:2, Interesting)
Like most people who quickly and disparagingly dismiss philosophical issues, you completely misunderstand the issue at hand even as you attempt to solve it.
Possibly there could have been aliens. You say maybe our intuitions on this account are wrong. I don't quite see how that could be the case though. It's certainly not logically necessary that only the things that in fact exist are those that actually exist. That would make all counterfactual statements false, which is absurd. This issue has nothing do with how evolution works, or whether aliens designed other aliens or whatever. The issue is that in asserting that something possibly exists you're asserting that it does exist, in some sense. Formally this is cashed out in terms of possible worlds using a logically rigorous method outlined later in the article which, of course, you don't understand. I happen to think this whole debate's nonsense too. But you're only right by accident, as it were, since you clearly don't even understand the issue enough to coherently critique it.
And in fact this issue, which seems utterly arcane, does have real-world consequences. If you believe that damaging the environment is immoral because it harms future generations then, congratulations, you've staked a significant philosophical position on this issue because you're regarding NON-EXISTENT PEOPLE as moral agents worthy or moral consideration in our economic and social calculations. Try to explain how we can have a moral obligation to people who don't exist. No matter what you say you've taken a stance on an issue related to this. And the idea that we have a responsibility to future generations not to ruin the planet is hardly some wacky philosophical idea: you hear it all the time in politics about social security and the debt and the environment.
Re:Academics (Score:3, Interesting)
Great minds think alike and fools never differ. (The last, and most important part, of that quote is often forgotten.) Peer review is important and is the best solution to many academic problems to date, but it is prone to false positives and false negatives. Ideally, you'd have three methodologies - two (peer review being one) run in parallel such that the second methodology is going to pick up probably good information that is rejected by peer review but is not going to pick up more than an absolute minimum of gunk. A third method is then needed to collate the two sets of potentially-good information. It only has to filter out the remaining gunk, it doesn't have to do anything more than that.
Re:Ethics (Score:1, Interesting)
you must be a sophomore. the golden rule has no structural failing except for those who practice willfull ignorance. it is an admonition to someone contemplating a bad act. it does not and was never meant to stand on its own as a theorem. there is an accepted context to the golden rule. if I'm lucky, I'll sit on your prelim committee someday, and bully you until you cry. or pee in your skinny jeans.