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.'"
tags are correct (Score:4, Funny)
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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 completel
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models like slashdot sound great but it's incredibly easy for people to poopsock moderation and game the system. That's the problem with any ratings system - someone needs to be able to nix the moderation, but that person now becomes the one with the questionable bias.
Stanford's solution is good as long as they're willing to accept that information will be outdated and/or it won't be complete. It also depends on the format they use.
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Dave's a little too into World of Warcraft. He's been poopsocking for about 12 hours now.
Dammit, casual players can't get anywhere in this game. The good stuff is all camped by poopsockers
SpawnSlayer13 is such a poopsock. He got from level 1 to 60 in the space of a day.
And to think there are people who would be so bold as to claim that the Internet has never done anything good for the English language...
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It's a conspiracy against the laity!
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Translation: "I don't understand a lot of what these people say, but I am reluctant to believe that there could be anything missing in my own education or intelligence, therefore I will ridicule the authors instead."
Re:tags are correct (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's the same everywhere. Most academics don't write with the goal to let others learn, they write to impress fellow academicians from the same field.
Re:tags are correct (Score:4, Insightful)
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Perhaps it's related to the fact that I'm not in a top10 university
You're probably right :p (even though the top10 appellation is a matter of context).
Speaking from experience, here are the 3 extremes: If you want great teachers at the undergrad level, go to a good (but not top) liberal arts school with no research program. If you want excellent peers who can challenge you and who you can learn from, go to a big research/liberal arts school (doesn't matter which one, they both attract the kind of people you might find intellectually stimulating). If you want research expe
Re:tags are correct (Score:5, Insightful)
No, translation: most people who are close to the material are generally incapable of communicating it to people who are not. This is not a lack of education or intelligence on the part of the others, but rather a lack of distance on the part of the authors.
No human being alive is capable of specializing in every single area of every single field simultaneously. There is simply not enough time in a human's lifespan. Most people are either generalists who specialize in all aspects of a single field with limited depth or specialists who focus on a handful of specific areas of a field. For example, on top of a broad general CS background, I have specialized CS knowledge in storage systems, with somewhat less specialized knowledge of security, networking, and a few other areas. I also have a background in communications with an emphasis in production (radio/TV). Although I can understand papers written about other areas of computing, it will generally take a lot longer for me to figure out the meaning of a highly technical paper in the field of crypto research than in the field of storage systems. That doesn't reflect a lack of education so much as a fundamental inability to specialize in every possible area at once.
This is why technical communication is hard, and why good technical writers are so valuable. It takes a special skill set to be able to both understand a piece of complex information and still communicate it in a way that is readily understandable to someone who is not intimately familiar with the jargon of a particular area of specialization within a field. When it comes to being understood by a more general audience within a given field (but outside the area of specialization), academic papers are among the worst examples of technical communication out there, often eschewing all sense of context in order to limit the amount of time spent writing so that they can focus on research. This is why peer-reviewed journal articles are quite often rewritten in a more intelligible form for broader consumption.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that model---both the precise, jargon-filled, rapidly written journal articles and the parsed, compiled, and summarized versions serve valuable purposes---but sadly, mistakes are often made when technical writers interpret those initial journal articles and try to make them comprehensible to people outside that area of specialization. That's why there is a real need for a continuous feedback loop with the people who write the original articles. Unfortunately, quite often this feedback loop does not exist. And that is worth criticizing.
I will almost certainly be criticized for this post using too much jargon. I can already see it coming....
Woolloomooloo? (Score:3, Insightful)
Academics (Score:5, Insightful)
My experience in academia taught me that there was no such thing as the "authoritative" source. If one scholar thought one thing about a particular subject, there was always at least one other scholar who disagreed with him/her. Most of the encyclopedia articles written in more scholarly encyclopedias (like Britannica) are therefore usually written by a single scholar, not a crowd of them. Get a crowd of these yahoos together and odds are you won't even get them to agree on what time it is. I've sat in on meetings where grown Ph.D.'s argued like children over so-and-so getting to teach a 100-level class that someone else wanted to teach (because so-and-so is an idiot who disagreed with them in some journal article written 20 years ago). Any attempt to get agreement out of scholars usually just results in really bland "committee" history (the kind some prevalent in so many unreadable textbooks). Such controversy-free scholarly writing is bizarre at best, absolutely misleading at worst.
For all the ribbing it takes, my experience with Wikipedia is that it's generally pretty reliable. In the subjects of my narrow areas of expertise, I've found it to be pretty accurate--or at least as accurate as any other conventional source (i.e. Britannica). Of course, scholars don't like it because they don't get paid to write articles for it (the way they often do in encyclopedias) and writing for it gets them no tenure-track kudos in the publish-or-perish world. That means most scholars are never going to be happy with Wikipedia. And that has nothing to do with its purported lack of accuracy, but rather scholarly politics.
Re:Academics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Academics (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Academics (Score:5, Funny)
over where the place the word 'the'
Well let's hope someone besides you made the final decision on that one
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A bunch of GS-12+ civilian employees arguing for half an hour over where the place the word 'the'.
It appears to me that we need to have our discussion at least once more...
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I believe it's called the bikeshedding.
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I had a design meeting for a web site a week or so ago. A good half an hour was spent debating whether the page should ask the customer to "select" one of the following, or "choose". Or "pick". Or "click on". Half an hour solid of heated debate, AND the perpetrators tried to bring it up several more times throughout the 2 hour meeting.
So yes, I agree with you- people suck.
I think that was the gist of your point, anyway.
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My experience in academia taught me that there was no such thing as the "authoritative" source. If one scholar thought one thing about a particular subject, there was always at least one other scholar who disagreed with him/her. Most of the encyclopedia articles written in more scholarly encyclopedias (like Britannica) are therefore usually written by a single scholar, not a crowd of them. Get a crowd of these yahoos together and odds are you won't even get them to agree on what time it is. I've sat in on meetings where grown Ph.D.'s argued like children over so-and-so getting to teach a 100-level class that someone else wanted to teach (because so-and-so is an idiot who disagreed with them in some journal article written 20 years ago). Any attempt to get agreement out of scholars usually just results in really bland "committee" history (the kind some prevalent in so many unreadable textbooks). Such controversy-free scholarly writing is bizarre at best, absolutely misleading at worst.
Those kind of disagreements are usually only about fine details. In most academic domains including philosophy there is broad agreement on what positions are reasonable.
For all the ribbing it takes, my experience with Wikipedia is that it's generally pretty reliable. In the subjects of my narrow areas of expertise, I've found it to be pretty accurate--or at least as accurate as any other conventional source (i.e. Britannica). Of course, scholars don't like it because they don't get paid to write articles for it (the way they often do in encyclopedias) and writing for it gets them no tenure-track kudos in the publish-or-perish world. That means most scholars are never going to be happy with Wikipedia. And that has nothing to do with its purported lack of accuracy, but rather scholarly politics.
I love Wikipedia. It's a great place for people new to a topic to go to get some context and direction. The overall quality of the philosophy articles is poor though. Many times they are about the equivalent of an undergraduate essay. It's more than just politics, at least for philosophy. It really is a quality issue.
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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
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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.
Sure, it's hard to tell whether the consensus exists because we are dealing with great minds or fools and some sorts of checks and balances can help sort that out but that doesn't preclude the idea that consensus may be built on such a system. In other words just because it's a consensus doesn't mean its wrong. I am all for questioning authority and not accepting superficial agreement as a sign of truth but on the other hand I think the most common bias these days is to go the other way (i.e. anyone that
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No.
If I say Frankenstein (to use a literary example) is about the conflict of man versus science, and you say it is about family relations, we both may or may not be correct. If you say it is about a giant, glowing, purple duck, then you are 100% wrong. No "dissent doubleplusungood crimething" involved. For everything there is a limited amount of correct avenues of interpretation, and an infinite area outside of it that is just plain wrong.
If I say Sartre's Being and Nothingness is about smurfs, I am wro
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FWIW, I use and cite SEP articles. I do occasionally check through Wikipedia, but they're working to a different audience, and the quality of their articles on second-tier philosophy subjects is pretty damn low. They are very different beasts. Wikipedia is very fast, and for subjects that are high-velocity, it's unbeatable.
On the other hand, Wikipedia can't get to the same level of detail as the SEP because of Wikipedia's model of editing-by-committee and governance-by-wikielite
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Also, Wikipedia's clear advantage is that you can SEE the discussion part, as it is documented in the "Talk" section. It is quite usual that I look into these sections to assess the reliability of an article.
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Congratulations, you've experienced human nature.
Now imagine those sort of arguments happening continuously around the world by an effectively infinite number of people often with nothing productive to do for the rest of the day. Worse, imagine that - unlike in academia (IME) - no-one wears their proud bias on their sleeves for filtering where necessary, but everyone pretends to be fair and balanced.
That's Wikipedia, that is.
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Wikipedia is a sausage factory in a glass house. Far too much information about the information to escape that queasy feeling. I think this is a good thing. Too much of our appeal to authority is not having to know which ingredients came from China, and the level of lead paint in the soil there.
Here's a lede sentence on Godel from SEP:
What a thicket of weasel words only an academic could love. There's
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Most of the "young" academics I know, and a lot of other domain experts contribute to Wikipedia.
Y'know - the truth and facts and things... they have a certain sort of persistence and value.
And ok, there's no credit, but that's what grant applications and papers are for right?
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My experience in academia taught me that there was no such thing as the "authoritative" source. If one scholar thought one thing about a particular subject, there was always at least one other scholar who disagreed with him/her.
There will always be someone who disagrees, whether in academia or politics or industry. This is a good thing - disagreements lead to experiments, which lead to answers and convergence on more accurate hypotheses. But one of the unfortunate side effects of debate is that some members of the public will inevitably latch onto crackpot ideas that agree with their pre-existing notions of the world, and assign as much value to the opinion of a single scholar as to the settled findings of the field. For example,
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Whether one way is better than the other remains to be seen, but I don't really see the conflict - there is plenty of space on the net for Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, Stanford Encyclopedia etc. Arguing that there should be only one encyclopedia is like arguing that there should only be one newspaper.
What I see as a problem with efforts to substantially increase standards with the development of an encyclopedia is this: how do you keep the information from getting stale? The 1911 Encyclopedia Brittianica is a wonderful source of information but the information in it is a century out of date. For some things that isn't too bad, although a century of scientific discovery has made much of that publication obsolete or at least not something to reference when even doing an initial survey of a topic.
Effort
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But there is more fundamental reason why Wikipedia is not only an acc
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In my areas of expertise, I've found Wikipedia to be at least as accurate any conventional source as well... Or in other words, wildly inaccurate.
Re:Academics (Score:5, Insightful)
My experience in academia taught me that there was no such thing as the "authoritative" source.
My impression of the term "authoritative" in an academic context is that it usually doesn't mean "correct" so much as "citable". Someone is an "authority" in that they've actually done some research or survey or study, and they are citing their own work and their own conclusions, so you are thereby allowed to cite them citing their own work. When you cite them, it doesn't mean that what you've said is correct. It means that what you've said can be backed up by someone else with supposed expertise.
And so the problem with the Wikipedia (and encyclopedias in general) is that they are not primary sources, and generally no particular person is claiming responsibility for the articles. That doesn't necessarily make them less accurate or less reliable, but it does mean they're less authoritative.
If that doesn't make it clear, think about the word "official". You get an official statement from a business. Is it more true than an unofficial statement? Not necessarily. What's the difference? There is some official source of the statement that you can cite. I can go to the Apple website and find a claim that Apple iPads are "magical", and I can cite that as an official statement from Apple. I may be able to find a Wikipedia article that says that iPads are not "magical", which would not be official in any way. "Official" has nothing to do with truth, it's just about having a source. "Authoritative" is sometimes used with a similar meaning.
It is getting pretty popular, actually (Score:5, Informative)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is pretty great. A lot of young academics and Ph.D's in philosophy are writing stuff up for it. Really great resource.
It isn't really an alternative to Wikipedia though: Wikipedia is about more than just philosophy. Similarly, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy - the big printed encyclopedia on philosophy - isn't an alternative to Britannica. It is a subject-specific encyclopedia. The two have different roles.
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Good Way to Compare (Score:2)
Awesome! (Score:3, Insightful)
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Would that be legal?
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Informative)
No, it's not legal to copy the articles to Wikipedia, since they grant no other right than free view. See their copyright [stanford.edu]: basically the author retains the copyright, and grants Stanford the right to publish the article electronically.
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I think facts can be copied with a citation to the source?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've been struck by the negative opinions of the discipline of philosophy on Slashdot over the last few years. Lots of people saying "No empirical testing? Then it's crap!", without apparently realizing that vital questions they have to face in everyday life, such as ethics, are part of philosophy. It's not just all fanciful proofs of God or poststructural interpretations of classic literature.
Yes, many people seem to be really hung up on the fact that philosophy is not science. Unfortunately for them almost all of science is based on metaphysics and the scientific method (the very tool they are are using to heap scorn on philosophy) is the result of epistemology. Philosophy is thinking about thinking; it's a meta-subject. It will always have value as long as people are eager to have their ideas criticized. Unfortunately most of the people saying "No empirical testing? Then it's crap!" are th
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It wasn't always as you describe. Philosophy has really always been the study of the unknowable. And as knowledge progresses and we learn how to discover things, they stop being philosophy. Much of what we consider science was once the purview of philosophy, until science was invented. There's a reason why an older name for science is 'natural philosophy,' and why PhD stands for Doctorate of Philosophy.
Of course, in today's world the realm of the unknowable is so obscure that 'philosophy,' in modern times h
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They also don't realize that major areas of philosophy underlay empiricism. Specifically metaphysics (the study of the nature of existence) and epistemology (the study of the nature of knowledge). If you are doing physical science you are assuming certain metaphysical and epistemic conclusions. You may not be interested in them, but, as the cliche goes, they are interested in you. Combine that with the fact that another areas of philosophy, logic, underlies mathematics and you have one very fundamental disc
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A non scottish system of ethics? Then it's crap!
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man... no Austin Powers fans here today!
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1: There is no such thing as choice which is not random.
2: 2nd law of thermodynamics.
3: Maya
1 and 3 being related to 'free-will'.
some people do not have Maya.
given that a system of ethics should be one where all people and things are treated equally (yes you should treat up like a golf ball)
given the 2nd law, such a system should also be balanced
a system based on ownership would only be balanced if the ownership was balanced, that is neither a capitalist nor academic system. wikipedia is near a balanced sys
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If you'd like, I can come over and we can empirically test some ethical quandaries.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Okay, well suppose I want to be sucker punched by a stranger out of the blue or have my genitals grabbed by a stranger without invitation. That's what I should do to them?
Yes, that's what this instance of the golden rule is saying. Which is why the rabbinical version (the sane one) tells you not to do things unto others which you do not want to be done to you.
The golden rule isn't a rule of morality at all, actually.
I don't think morality means what you think it means. The golden rule is the most vanilla example of a moral guide, and has been presented that way by many religions and philosophies for thousands of years.
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Well, that's great... (Score:5, Insightful)
If all you want is information on philosophy. I'd like to see similar encyclopedias on other disciplines, like physics or engineering.
But if you want a track listing for Led Zeppelin IV, or just want to do some personal research like I did before my eye surgeries, or for a slashdot argument, Wikipedia is the place to go.
If you're doing academic research, it's a good pointer to citable publications and articles. And I rather like having to click to read about related stuff; it keeps me from having to go over stuff I may already understand.
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If all you want is information on philosophy. I'd like to see similar encyclopedias on other disciplines, like physics or engineering.
But if you want a track listing for Led Zeppelin IV, or just want to do some personal research like I did before my eye surgeries, or for a slashdot argument, Wikipedia is the place to go.
Or if you want information on philosophy, Wikipedia is the place to go, to find articles that will cite/quote this encyclopedia of philosophy.
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Similar experiences. I had an infection in my left eye, and was prescribed steroid eyedrops, which caused a cataract. It was actually a blessing in disguise, as the cataract surgery changed my vision from 20/400 to 20/16 at all distances (I got a Crystalens accomodating IOL, don't even need reading glasses any more). Then I had a retinal tear in the same eye, that the surgeon welded together with a laser. Then cryotherapy because the struts on the IOL got in the way of the laser. Then it detached, so I had
Here, fixed that for you (Score:5, Funny)
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 do better.
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The readability seems to be questionable. (Score:5, Insightful)
This piqued my interest so I took a look at an article on "Actualism". Here is the first paragraph:
To understand the thesis of actualism, consider the following example. Imagine a race of beings — call them ‘Aliens’ — that is very different from any life-form that exists anywhere in the universe; different enough, in fact, that no actually existing thing could have been an Alien, any more than a given gorilla could have been a fruitfly. Now, even though there are no Aliens, it seems intuitively the case that there could have been such things. After all, life might have evolved very differently than the way it did in fact. For example, if the fundamental physical constants or the laws of evolution had been slightly different, very different kinds of things might have existed. So in virtue of what is it true that there could have been Aliens when in fact there are none, and when, moreover, nothing that exists in fact could have been an Alien?
If this is a representative sample then I'll stick to wikipedia. Can someone decipher that last sentence for me? I've read it several times and I can't seem to grasp what it is saying.
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This piqued my interest so I took a look at an article on "Actualism". Here is the first paragraph:
So in virtue of what is it true that there could have been Aliens when in fact there are none, and when, moreover, nothing that exists in fact could have been an Alien?
If this is a representative sample then I'll stick to wikipedia. Can someone decipher that last sentence for me? I've read it several times and I can't seem to grasp what it is saying.
The problem is that you're not used to certain kinds of philosophical jargon.
The author is asking: Given that there are no aliens and that nothing which exists could have been (counterfactually) an alien, what would make the sentence "There could have been Aliens" true?
It's abstruse philosophy about the problems of what could make a sentence that "X is possible" true, given that X is in fact false, as I understand it. (Perhaps my move from "there could have been..." to "...is possible" is not an equivalenc
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Philosphers still debate this stuff? Hasn't Judea Pearl [wikipedia.org] (et al) already solved this with the method of causal nets and counterfactual surgery? (Presentation) [ucla.edu]
Thanks for nothing, philosophers!
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vaj Daq vo' nuq 'oH 'oH teH vetlh pa' laH ghaj taH ghorgh Daq pa' 'oH pagh 'ej ghorgh pagh vetlh Daq laH ghaj taH?
I'm a bit rusty, but it does seem to parse out better in Klingon.
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The original:
My translation: What makes it true that there could be Aliens, when there are none in fact, and they are precluded from existing by the "Laws of N
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The article writer should have at the very least emphasized the word "what."
"In virtue of WHAT is it true that ..."
In other words, how can we get away with saying "there could have been Aliens" when none of the things that actually exist could have been Aliens?
I don't see how this is such a conundrum. It's like wondering how it could be true that my backpack could have contained a flashlight, even though none of the objects currently in my backpack could have been a flashlight.
Yes to your explanation, yes to your opinion on the topic, and an even bigger yes to your criticism of the wording of that sentence.
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Our intuition tells us that there "could have been" Aliens. If our intuition is true, *how* can it be true, given that i) there are no Aliens in existence, and ii) there are no situations or evolutionary pressures which could have caused any actual organism to evolve into an Alien?
Then ( our intuition is wrong, OR we are wrong about the nature of evolutionary pressure OR the aliens were intelligently designed by other, naturally evolved aliens ) AND ( its possible for something to exist - 'could exist' - even if it doesn't. Think about transient things that only exist for a short period. They *can* exist, but might not exist *right now*)
How is this a big fucking mystery? It's just a stupid play on words.
This is why I didn't study Philosophy at university. I did one of the short intro
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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
Awesome site but it's not new... (Score:4, Informative)
I've been going to plato.stanford.edu for years.
Decades... (Score:2, Funny)
"For decades, Stanford has been working on a different kind of Wikipedia"
http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=3&music=11&url=plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/ [wonder-tonic.com]
Wikipedia if Run By Academic Experts.. (Score:5, Funny)
So the article is titled:
"Wikipedia, if it were run by academic experts, would look like this"
Intrigued I clicked the link and got a firefox unable to connect/page unavailable error. So in principle I agree. This is exactly what a webpage with wikipedia's user base would look like if it were run by Academics.
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.
Why would you want to not let people change it? (Score:2)
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
For some reason, this line really bugs me. Maybe it depends on what your goal is? If your goal is to provide the most up-to-date, complete reference, then heck yes, I would say, you SHOULD put it somewhere that other people can change it. In case they have anything to add to what you wrote, or in case there are any things y
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Wikipedia has a lousy handle on C. If you don't see this, your adherence to the idea of Wikipedia is blinding you to the reality of Wikipedia.
In addition, the vetting of initial information so that people can make minor changes at a later time is pretty bad, too.
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This is exactly where Wikipedia falls down.
No, it doesn't. It appears to on topics on which there's widespread agreement about factual knowledge because there's an easily referenced external source. On any topic requiring real expertise, or worse, a topic on which there are few experts (but many who think
Citizendium (Score:2)
Centizendium is the half-way point between the free-for-all of Wikipedia, and the extremely stuffy "authoritative" wikis (at that point, really, why bother?).
With CZ, you are required to use your real name, and if you largely write an article and hang around to maintain it, you do get a degree of ownership to it, with etiquette and policy dictating that any other contributors merely suggest their recomended changes to the original author via the talk page, rather than everyone willy-nilly making changes as
You're right it is like a journal. (Score:2)
120 only ?! Too few reviewers! (Score:2)
120 only ?! That is far too few reviewers!
That is less than one per academic topic.
No wonder that Wikipedia will remain relevant.
Philosphers? (Score:2)
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It's been tried: Nupedia. Citizendium. (Score:4, Informative)
I wish them luck, but it is certainly not the first time it's been tried. In fact, Wikipedia originated as Nupedia [wikipedia.org], "an English-language Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content." After three years, perhaps 100 articles were close to completion. Wikipedia was originally conceived as a source of draft articles to be reworked into Nupedia.
The assignment of credit for Wikipedia between Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger is a matter of dispute. The two, sometimes described as co-founders, have squabbled publicly. Sanger is probably responsible for some of the cultural foundations of Wikipedia that have led to the surprisingly high degree of accuracy it has.
In 2006, Sanger, unhappy with Wikipedia's undervaluing of expertise, launched Citizendium [citizendium.org], an expert-approved wiki-based encyclopedia, which is said to currently have "We currently have 14,722 articles at different stages of collaborative development, of which 148 are expert-approved."
I am not saying Stanford's experiment can't succeed. I'm not saying Citizendium has failed. But I know where I got for answers, and it's not Citizendium. (And it's not Knol, either). The traditional encyclopedia--Encyclopedia Britannica--was able to pay contributors, using money it earned by selling print volumes. The social ecology of free web encyclopedias is tricky. There is probably more to success than saying "We'll be just like Wikipedia, but we'll restrict participation to experts." Experts usually want to be paid in something more than ego-boosting.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I wish them luck, but it is certainly not the first time it's been tried.
Actually, given that it originated in 1995, it probably is.
Okay you asked for the philosophical argument (Score:2)
This is a Wiki on Philosophy. Wikipedia is Wiki meant to be an encyclopedia of everything possible. How does one show that this is what Wikipedia would look like if run by academics if it's not serving the exact same purpose? So would that mean Wookiepedia.com is what Wikipedia would look like if run by Star Wars fans? It's like handing a book on philosophy to someone and saying "This is what Encyclopedia Britanica would look like if Philosophers wrote it."
authoritative, but incomprehensible (Score:2)
However, the editor of the stanford site is quite right, that academics and others with some expertise don't want to see their hardwork trashed on wiki; I personaly know a lot about molecular biology and DNA, but have stopped contributing because, (a) doofuses keep saying stuff that is wrong, and
They don't get it. (Score:2)
You do want people to change it, if they have improved the facts.
And you want it to be up-to-date. If it takes six months to get the first word of an article online, then there's a chance you've got a lot of facts in the article that have been overcome by events in that six months. Not so relevant on Thomas Aquinas, hyper-relevant on Solar Technology.
Yes, peer review is a good thing that improves the chances the facts are correct. But you have to be able to take a fractal approach to granularity of the f
Wikipedia As a Source (Score:2)
``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.''
This is why, when using Wikipedia as a source, you should link to the Wikipedia article at a certain point in time. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia&oldid=383329630 [wikipedia.org] is always going to refer
Sokal affair (Score:4, Insightful)
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It proved only that if a physicist lies to non-physicists about physics, he can fool them. Yeah, they shouldn't have printed the article since they had no way of vetting it. But, still, it would have sank into oblivion if Sokal himself hadn't raised it from the dead: there's not a single citation to it until Sokal contacted the media with the news about his stunt.
All that post-structuralist stuff *is* crap, of course. But Sokal didn't do anything to demonstrate that.
review? (Score:3, Insightful)
As an ultimate answer to this question one would like to have something similar to Bell's (1964) famous theorem, i.e., a succinct crispy statement of the fundamental difference between quantum and classical systems, encapsulated in the non-commutative character of observables.
- It is not clear to me that the adjective "crispy" should ever be used to modify the noun "statement" in a professional publication. - Even so, a comma should be inserted between two consecutive adjectives: "a succinct, crispy statement" - 120 reviewers: fail
Re:Wow (Score:4, Funny)
Let me guess: 9-11 truther? ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't there possibly room for both models to succeed?
Wikipedia's good at covering a lot of topics broadly, but not great for drilling down into a specific topic in the kind of depth that someone studying it for post-graduate work would find useful or helpful. At some point, that kind of peer-reviewed material has to migrate more strongly away from being in dead-tree journals.
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It already has in some fields. See arxiv.org.
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First of all, it isn't an encyclopedia in terms of "drilling down" on a topic with depth. I know World Book did have some authors with its "supplements" that had a few articles that went into greater depth than a typical encyclopedia article. Still, those were still articles of general interest that were written for ordinary people to learn more about a topic that had broad readership. Those articles were more akin to something you would see in a National Geographic, Scientific American, or New Yorker Ma
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Fool-proof method to fool that...
Step 1: Use wikipedia for information
Step 2: View cited sources for wikipedia.
Step 3: Cite cited wikipedia sources.
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!