Stanford's Authoritative Alternative To Wikipedia

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.'"

Comments

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[yincrash]

this has already been attempted. however, if stanford can keep it going and make sure it keeps reviewing then it could work. Can I submit a wikipedia article for peer reviewed inclusion?

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[Anonymous Coward]

The article about 4chan on this server should be awesome...

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[Anonymous Coward]

This would valuable in tandem with Wikipedia. It won't stand alone of course, since most "academic" authors write with the primary goal of displaying their intellectual prowess, rather than actually communicating understanding.

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[FuckingNickName]

It's a conspiracy against the laity!

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[erroneus]

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.

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[poetmatt]

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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[psychodelicacy]

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."

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[BrentH]

I don't know if you're in a uni and what your field is, but as physics master I certainly can attest that 95% of 'teachers' in phys and math are like that. Perhaps it's related to the fact that I'm not in a top10 university, but I guesstimate this phenomena is widespread.

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[bluefoxlucid]

Teachers that can't teach? Preposterous!

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[dgatwood]

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....

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[drewhk]

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.

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[Anonymous Coward]

> ...but as [a] physics master....

Well, I am a level-23 Physics Master and I smite thee with my +1 battle mace!

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[gregrah]

For those of you wondering, as I was, about the definition of poopsock...

1. A sock that is used as a temporary contained for faecal matter.
2. A vital part of any dedicated EverQuest player's equipment. A poopsock eliminates the need to go all the way to the bathroom, which wastes valuable levelling time.
3. An insult used to refer to an obsessive MMORPG player who gains an unusually high number of levels in one day.

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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[maxwell demon]

Bah, I've got a +5 battle mace annihilation operator. Oh, and I have my own Hilbert space to hide in.

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[burisch_research]

You used to much jargon!

*snigger*

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[burisch_research]

too* ftw ... gaah ...

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[erroneus]

Just to be clear, the rating system would be one based on the progress of its peer review process, not one where users moderate. In my plan, it would be where people can read at different levels only, not participate or interfere with the process.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I believe in his proposed system it would not work like slashdot; the ratings would be based on actual peer review, not semi-random allocation of modpoints. In other words, people stated who are reviewing and approving articles would be the only /moderators/

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[Omestes]

this has already been attempted.

Yes, by Stanford, and its called the Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Its been around of a longish period of time, I used it in college when I was working on my Philosophy degree. Both it and the paper Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy were invaluable sources of find good starting points for papers and discussions.

Also; regular old print encyclopedias have been using extensive peer review for (hundreds of) years. I don't think bringing an standard practice online is really that big of a deal. The Stanford reference is just a normal encyclopedia of philosophy, but in HTML rather than boring ink and pulp, so it isn't a very surprising development.

In other words; how is this news?

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[Omestes]

I already replied to you, but left out something interesting...

This has been around LONGER than Wikipedia, by around six years.

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[thrawn_aj]

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 experience, go to a big research school.

In reality, you'll want to balance these three aspects (according to your own needs - level of independence, motivation, interests) to pick the "top10" school for you.

Also, regarding parent's main point - no, I have not found "95%" of teachers (imo you quotified the wrong thing :p) in physics and math like that. Did my undergrad in physics at a relatively obscure midwestern liberal arts school - excellent teachers, in every sense of the word. Piss-poor peers (hey, it rhymes!). Doing my PhD at a huge-ass top-tier school on the west coast. Again, excellent teachers. I have found time and again that teachers in lower level courses frequently get rated much higher than those in upper level courses when the student body is mediocre and vice-versa when the student body is what an average person would call "overachieving" (whatever that means *eyeroll*). Parent appears to have been singularly unlucky (or non-objective - I don't really know him/her) to have found such a high percentage of mediocre teachers.

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[thrawn_aj]

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.

And you say this from your exhaustive experience in ... every single academic field :p ? Try not to make such blanket statements - they give you away as a drive-by poster. If you've ever read a single paper in the physical sciences (also a part of "academics"), you will see how ridiculous your statement is. You may have a point in the (imo overly verbose) humanities, but since I have little personal experience with it, I will refrain from stating such a thing categorically - something you might want to think about yourself.

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[Antisyzygy]

They don't only write for that reason. Though its normal for any person to want to display something that they do to show others what the are worth, they also write articles because its their job. They need to attract grant money and contract money for research as well as for the University they are employed by. Their job first and foremost is to get money for students and research. Its not in their interest to "lord over" you with their "intellectual prowess" any more than a plumber wishes to "belittle" you with his "plumb-ery".

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[Anonymous Coward]

You may have a point in the (imo overly verbose) humanities...

It's true in humanities, well, more so than "hard sciences". It's simply a byproduct of the fact that in those fields there is no correct answer, so you end up trying to show how clever you are. But it's gradation, bleeding into "social sciences", into "hard sciences", last perhaps being the math.

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[Antisyzygy]

Do you have any idea how long of a paper say for example a Mathematician PhD, would have to write for the average person to learn from it? Henceforth I will be referring to science fields when I speak about academic papers. Typically academic papers are written for those with a similar understanding of the material. They don't write them at that level to stump everyone, they do it simply because they would have to write several textbooks of material to get anyone up to speed with what they are talking about. Its important to fit your research onto as few pages as possible to summarize what you do. Otherwise, scientific journals would come to you in an entire truck load. Its not that the average person is incapable of learning the material, its just that scientist spend years or even decades of their life learning this stuff. To assume that anyone can do it in an afternoon is preposterous.

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[the_womble]

Its been going for 15 years: I think the chances are that it is sustainable.

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[rtb61]

Sounds like a great tool. Use Wikipedia to find the answers and then use Stanfords Encyclopaedia of Philosophy for the references, now it just needs to be extend out by other Universities into other areas of speciality.

Wikipedia still the better starting spot, easier reading (not simple but quality of readability), good links and, loads of supporting articles. Stanford's inherent error, anyone should be able to contribute but all work submitted should be subject to qualified peer reviewed prior to uploading (required detailed registration, bad articles results in extended exclusion), otherwise you come off like a bunch of stuck up wankers and you cripple the ability of the encyclopaedia to grow, beyond being a easy reference point, on limited subjects.

When it comes to quality scientific,factual output the skills of the reviewers often counts far more than the person doing the work, in ensuring accuracy and factual output.

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[dwye]

> Piss-poor peers (hey, it rhymes!).

No, it alliterates.

BTW, I started in Physics at a top research school, and my teachers there were all good AS teachers, as well as researchers (not their fault that I wasn't up to their level). OTOH, there were other departments notorious for (indeed, proud of) their poor pedagogy, supposedly viewing it as a way to winnow wheat from chaff or some such nonsense. I expect that the GP picked his school's equivalent bad major.

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[ppanon]

It is if you work at the US patent office.

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[eggnoglatte]

...fellow academicians from the same field.

Maybe you should improve your own command of the English language before blasting others about their writing skills...

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[drewhk]

Funny, it was the Aspell dictionary that corrected it, and I have not double checked. Anyway, my spelling does not imply anything about the truth in my comment, especially considering that it is not my mother language.

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[drewhk]

Where did you get the idea that I am talking about humanities?? In fact I talk about computer sciences and mathematics. There are many terribly written papers and books around, and no, I am not talking about the 2nd/3rd grade joke journals or publishers.

And no, this is not a new observation, nor I am the only one making this statement. See Edwin Thompson Jaynes or Morris Kline to name some. Also look in the works of György Pólya to see what I consider the good way.

Btw, as a hobby I study the history of mathematics and study some of the original texts, and by comparison I do not like the direction where we are heading in these days. While it seems that we are more precise and rigorous, we are still not precise enough, but we are abstract enough to lose a lot of comprehension. Also we try to weed out any intuitive explanations just because they are not strictly "true" -- whatever that means.

Also, today's textbooks follow an order that was not followed by history. Nowadays you start with an axiomatization and arrive at the useful stuff at the end (where students usually already gave up), while the actual history was with useful empirical stuff that was consolidated over time to become an axiomatic system.

In fact, I could write _pages_ about this matter. Maybe you feel insulted, because you are from academy.

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[drewhk]

Dammit, I deleted the last line, so correctly:

Maybe you feel insulted, because you are from academy.

Please do not take criticism as _personal_ criticism against _your_ work. I criticize people not because of fun, but to point out some issues in how academy works.

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[Doggabone]

...fellow academicians from the same field.

Maybe you should improve your own command of the English language before blasting others about their writing skills...

academician
n.
1. An academic.
2. A member of an art, literary, or scientific academy or society.

I completely fail to see your point. Is it that academians would be more common? Or would you prefer academics? Since your familiar with English, you know that it's rife with synonyms, and that it different English regions spellings and word preferences can and do differ.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I generally thought it was a good idea to write a PhD dissertation by starting from the level of someone who has taken the required pre-comprehensive exam graduate courses.

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[Anonymous Coward]

If you think about it, it's really not the optimal system.

I mean, to poop into a sock cannot be any small feat. Granted that if you're doing this, you obviously don't care about cleanliness but in the interest of keeping electronics in working order, you don't want poop on the keyboard or mouse. If you have to hold the sock, you won't be playing and may as well go to the toilet, and if you're just sort of crapping in your seat and wiping it up, you don't care about the smell or much shit is still on your ass and could just squat over the wastebasket if not outright making a pile where you sit on the computer chair.

Clearly if you could get away with shitting in your room without objection, you could just as easily set up the computer in the bathroom (avoiding the mistake that is wireless internet).

Posting Anon because... because.

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[Hognoxious]

Since your familiar with English, you know that it's rife with synonyms

True, or so I've herd.

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[thrawn_aj]

> Piss-poor peers (hey, it rhymes!).

No, it alliterates.

Ach. My english teacher would have backhanded me for that one :p - my bad.

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[thrawn_aj]

Nah, I wasn't taking it personally, though my tone did come off that way (for which I apologize). Thanks for the clarifying post though. I later read another post of yours (farther down the thread) to which I responded much more positively (without realizing it was you again). Strange how that works sometimes.

Having said that, you have yet to address the second part of your thesis: "Most academics don't write with the goal to let others learn, they write to impress fellow academicians from the same field.

While I freely acknowledge (but didn't do such a good job of pointing this out) that papers can be written badly, it does not necessarily follow (nor is the idea rooted in fact) that this is because they are "trying to impress their fellow academicians". And this is especially not true in the physical sciences (if for no other reason than that the format for those publications rarely, if ever, supports that goal). My reference to the humanities was to distinguish between it and its complement at the outset.

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[drewhk]

"Nah, I wasn't taking it personally, though my tone did come off that way (for which I apologize)."

No worries, my initial post was a bit harsh, probably.

"Having said that, you have yet to address the second part of your thesis: "Most academics don't write with the goal to let others learn, they write to impress fellow academicians from the same field."

OK, let me give you an example from mathematics.

Take a mathematician working on proving theorem A. Over several month he tries to apply technique C, D, E, each of them failing. Finally, he modifies the original statement to be A2 and manages to prove it with the combinated technique C,E and F (the C and E technique comes from the previous experience trying to prove A). Now he has a fine theorem A2 and the necessary proof. Now he starts to revise the proof, and finally comes to a compressed (or using the notorious word: "elegant") proof G. At this point the mathematician publishes A2 and G.

Now, I as a reader I read A2 and G and find A2 interesting, but G is very hard to follow. In fact, I might understand each of the steps, but not grok the whole. I do not see the _strategy_ behind it. I might conclude that the mathematician is over my class, and I am real stupid. However in fact:

  - A2 was not the original theorem
  - G, however elegant, was not the original proof
  - formulating A2 and then obtaining G was not the original order

Now I am impressed, because I only saw the final outcome A2, G, but I could not learn, because it is something "compiled". It is completely my burden to reverse engineer the thoughtwork behind it. It is like reading assembly code -- you understand each and every step (they are trivial!), but not see the whole picture -- or the source code.

Now the mathematician could have been published (even if omitting failed attempt A) the original proof C, E, F and adding the motivation why C and E were used (coming from attempt A). In this case however there would be not that much magic! publishing A2, G gives a much mystic aura to the whole result...

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[thrawn_aj]

That's a rather clear example. When you put it like that, it (unfortunately) rings true. I believe I came across this kind of issue (though not in a publication context) when I read about "synthesis" vs "analysis" as a kid (re: writing proofs). If I understood correctly, this was the difference between the "forward" and "backward" analyses (exactly the two ways you described). You're right that pedagogically speaking, this is a piss-poor way of doing things.

I guess I'd just hesitate to attribute it simply to trying to impress people simply because in my own field (physics), journals usually have extremely tight page limits. As an experimentalist, I frequently run up against many blind alleys (in extremely technical ways that frequently have nothing to do with the physics). That sort of detail is best left to PhD theses - a publication usually needs to be as clear as possible (I guess this is where our examples drift apart, since there would be a LOT of significant information lost in your missing items). Also, we frequently have to restrain ourselves from being too detailed since experimentalists as a bunch are more in the line of "Damn, we tried this 6 different ways (and here they are in gory detail), but only this one worked and ain't it all just so fucking cool? :)". It may be a more visceral "us vs. nature" and we're eager to show our battle scars (SUCH a juvenile metaphor but it's the truth - at least for me :)) - dunno if that makes sense to anyone else.

Conversely, when I run into similar papers that are cleanly presented, I assume from the get-go (as do the people in your field I suppose) that the actual process was nowhere near as clean. An honest academic (and I have yet to meet someone who isn't honest, in this context; though I have no doubt such people do exist - the Fonzis of the academic world :)) will gladly describe (in conversation or through other means) the additional difficulties, circuitous routes and dead ends that are out of place in a publication. Of course, any such detours that are related to the actual physics should be at least alluded to (say in a final discussion section).

To summarize (sorry for rambling on so) - your point is very well taken. Thought I'd give an example from my own field with a slightly different perspective.

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[poetmatt]

it still has the same issue.

Those who provide peer review, if they have a fundamental disagreement or a personal issue that is non-professional, could use that to discredit legitimate research.

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[Ichoran]

Mathematics is not one of the physical sciences, so it is free to expend more effort on impressing others than on instructing them.

Same thing with computer science.

There really is a difference when you are in a field where data can give particularly clear insight into how things are; and then the major burden becomes explaining why this data is relevant to the problem (or why this theory is relevant to that data), and how it provides insight. (There is of course a little bit of "look how smart I am!" around the edges, but rarely enough to detract from the point.)

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like a normal encyclopedia? The opposite of Wikipedia?

Yes, please give me information that is only approved by authority figures.

Re:Wow

[bbtom]

Yes, please give me information that is only approved by authority figures.

Let me guess: 9-11 truther? ;-)

Re:Wow

[Mongoose Disciple]

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.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Harsh, lol.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

There certainly is room for both models to succeed, and we would be better off if that is the case. If Google Library can ever get through their copyright problems we can really see some educational advancements.

This article talks about an "alternative" to Wikipedia, which this is not.

Re:Wow

[Entropius]

It already has in some fields. See arxiv.org.

Re:Wow

[bluefoxlucid]

Encyclopedias are useless for real research.

Re:Wow

[maxwell demon]

Note that arXiv is not peer reviewed (except for a minimal sanity check). However, most articles sent to arXiv are also sent to traditional journals where they get peer review, and if a paper gets accepted in such a journal, generally you'll find a journal reference in arXiv.

Re:Wow

[Teancum]

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 Magazine.

There is this wonderful invention called.... a library. You ought to check it out. People can write books in depth on a specific topic and is wonderful for somebody studying that topic with post-graduate work. Believe it or not, there are even electronic libraries that have quite a bit to grab on-line if you want to obtain that knowledge without going to a physical building.

Getting away from being so silly here, I should point out that Nupedia tried this same approach in terms of having some peer-reviewed articles go through "subject experts" to review the articles for factual errors and to have some very high standards for publication. After two years they published just over a hundred article and the rate of submission actually went down over time. This little side project about a year into the effort using a technology called a "wiki" was used to supplement the Nupedia project and to give non-experts the chance to write some articles that wouldn't pass muster with Nupedia realizing that sometimes non-experts could put something together worthy of publication too. Oh yeah, the project was named "Wikipedia".

If you honestly think both efforts can co-exist and that some more intensive effort can be done, at least those involved need to find some model different than what Nupedia used. Otherwise, you would be forced into using something more like how encyclopedias created articles: paying experts some pretty good money to write the articles and making the encyclopedia proprietary. The question is how do you raise the money to be able to pay for that effort or make a business model that "works" with on-line content?

Re:Wow

[steelfood]

Nah: maverick.

Re:Wow

[markov_chain]

Actually I found that there is a lot of advanced math/engineering content on Wikipedia that seems like only readers with intimate knowledge of the topics would be able to understand. My biggest problem with the articles was that there was too little intuition given to help an outsider read the articles.

Re:Wow

[joh6nn]

Yes, please give me information that is only approved by authority figures.

Let me guess: 9-11 truther? ;-)

no, Galileo.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Galileo?

Academics

[elrous0]

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

[jlechem]

I've sat in on several United States Armed Forces meeting where they were writing documentation for the software I was working on. A bunch of GS-12+ civilian employees arguing for half an hour over where the place the word 'the'. It's not just academics, you get any large enough group trying to compile a document at the same time and it's going to be a clusterfuck.

Re:Academics

[divisionbyzero]

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.

Re:Academics

[brufleth]

Right. So an article on this other system can get through all that review with errors or at least with interpretations that are in dispute and unlike on Wikipedia those issues can't be fixed. Well they can be fixed but only after another shit storm of review and if those reviewers agrees etc etc. Wikis are excellent ways to document and organize knowledge in a relatively casual and cheap manner. Stanford setup a system that is slow, potentially still open to bias, definitely still open to mistakes, and requires much more resources. Comparing the two systems is like comparing a scooter to a tank.

Re:Academics

[FuckingNickName]

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.

Re:Academics

[sgt101]

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?

Re:Academics

[Anonymous Coward]

In most academic domains including philosophy there is broad agreement on what positions are reasonable.

Groupthink doubleplusgood.
Dissent doupleplusungood crimethink.

Re:Academics

[chrb]

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, there are undoubtedly a few scholars out there who will insist that evolution did not happen. However, this is not a "scholarly dispute", and there are very few people who would call these individuals authoritative just because they disagree with mainstream opinion.

Get a crowd of these yahoos together and odds are you won't even get them to agree on what time it is.

There are several perspectives here. One is that these people are human, and any large group of humans is unlikely to completely agree on every detail of a certain topic. Another perspective is the one already made - that disagreement is a good thing, because it leads to experiment proposals to resolve the issue.

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).

It's easy to bash "elitist" academics. Let's try that quote again...

• Any attempt to get agreement out of politicians usually just results in really bland "committee" history
• Any attempt to get agreement out of corporations usually just results in really bland "committee" history
• Any attempt to get agreement out of historians usually just results in really bland "committee" history

See, it works with everyone... Any attempt to get agreement out of people who disagree on a point will result in a compromise that appears "bland" to an external observer.

Such controversy-free scholarly writing is bizarre at best, absolutely misleading at worst.

Are you suggesting that academics should "teach the controversy"? Where have we heard that before?

scholars don't like it because they don't get paid to write articles for it

Actually, most scholars think that the concept of a world class free encyclopedia is awesome. Many of the Wikipedia articles that you praise were probably contributed to by academics at some point. The issue is something else: how a field is to be interpreted by Wikipedia authors. When looking at the field of astro-physics, should the written interpretation of that field be guided by "elistist authorative sources" like, say, Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein, or should we ascribe the same value to their interpretation as we would to any other human on the planet? There are some benefits of taking a Wikipedia "any collaborator" approach, but there are also drawbacks. 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.

Re:Academics

[Abstrackt]

Your comment reminds me of a demotivational poster: "none of us is as dumb as all of us".

Re:Academics

[Beerdood]

over where the place the word 'the'

Well let's hope someone besides you made the final decision on that one

Re:Academics

[sexconker]

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...

Re:Academics

[DingerX]

Aye, bad use of headlines.

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 (aka the people who put in the time and effort to be able to throw down TLAs and related wikijargon in the discussion threads). Simply put, the advantage of having one person be an authority on an article lies in that person being able to assure the meaning of every sentence. A simple "stylistic rewrite" can kill the sense of the passage (see above, where people have trouble making sense of a logical argument).

Also, SEP comes with a built-in system for citation to static versions, along with the requirement that authors keep their articles up-to-date by revising them at least every five years.

What's impressive is that it's fast rendering obsolete print dictionaries of philosophy. Yes, they still exist; but people are starting to ask why.

Re:Academics

[rthille]

I believe it's called the bikeshedding.

Re:Academics

[Belial6]

Bingo. I have sat through many lectures in college where the instructor was simply BSing their way through the subject matter, and many where they were just plain wrong. Not all of them mind you, but my experience with Wikipedia is that it is about as reliable as what you get out of a college. In both cases, you have to look at what kind of information is presented. Soft subjects are pretty poor. Hard subjects are generally pretty good, or at least verifiable. History is politically decided.

Re:Academics

[jd]

In most academic domains including philosophy there is broad agreement on what positions are reasonable.

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:Academics

[fermion]

I completely agree. Wikipedia has gotten a bad rap on two accounts. First, it is compared with Brittanica, and not the average piece of trash 'encyclopedia' that the average person might use or, at one time, buy for their kids. Being a Britannica user from a very early age, I was shock what they expected us to use at school. Wikipedia as a replacement for the 'door to door' encyclopedia, as opposed to the encyclopaedia, is excellent.

But there is more fundamental reason why Wikipedia is not only an acceptable, but preferable, replacement to a printed encyclopedia. Encyclopedias should never be trusted as a reliable secondary source for research. They will always contain factual errors, misinterpretations, and misprints, as any source will. Therefore they are to be used as a way to get a general overview for a new topic, which will then propel a researcher to more reliable sources. An encyclopedia should not even be allowed as a counted source in a class, though it should be cited if used. Wikipedia, in the current cited form, therefore is superior as it more likely that researches will read the primary and trusted secondary sources rather than rely on an untrusted source.

An online encyclopedia that merely attempts to mimic the offline form which grew from the vagaries of the publishing industry is not doing anything useful, even if free. A mid 20th century paper edition of the britannica, which is still useful, is under $100, which is cheap. An online encyclopedia is by necessity going to look different and have different priorities. Wikipedia is one increment of that evolution.

Re:Academics

[DerekLyons]

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).

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.
 

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.

Yes, of course. It's all politics. It's always politics. The poor writing, byzantine policies, and the need to level up within WikiPedia:The Roleplaying Game in order to get anything significant done has nothing to do with it.

Re:Academics

[drewhk]

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.

Re:Academics

[modecx]

Hell, it's hard enough to get a small group of people to agree on pizza toppings. I can't imagine what kind of clusterfuck could be caused by a bunch of stubborn, egotistical scholarly types.

Re:Academics

[nine-times]

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.

Re:Academics

[Anonymous Coward]

I once sat in a meeting with high level officials who argued about the color of an evaluation matrix for 2 hours. I'll never get those 2 hours back.. sigh.

Re:Academics

[maxwell demon]

But what if an article happens to be just as accurate after the five years as it was before? Do they have to make arbitrary changes just to comply with the formal rules?

Re:Academics

[divisionbyzero]

In most academic domains including philosophy there is broad agreement on what positions are reasonable.

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 claims authority is ipso facto wrong, biased, acting only in their own interest, etc). This bias is just as bad. Some positions are better than others.

Re:Academics

[Anonymous Coward]

clusterfuck sounds kinky and fun.

Re:Academics

[maxwell demon]

Yes, people contribute to Wikipedia until their negative experience with editing it surpasses their enthusiasm.

Re:Academics

[Patch86]

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.

Re:Academics

[damburger]

Furthermore, in most English Departments there is broad agreement on when its reasonable to start trotting out 1984 references, and as a response to any academic consensus whatsoever is not such a time.

Re:Academics

[Teancum]

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.

Efforts like Nupedia likely could have succeeded over time with a whole lot of persistence, but the contents of those articles would quickly go stale without some persistent re-writing of the article from time to time. Essentially, over a certain period of time (roughly 10-20 years) you need to essentially rewrite the entire encyclopedia. How do you accomplish that task with high standards?

The Citizendium is about the best alternative to Wikipedia that I've seen, and even that project has some serious problems getting itself going... and relies upon Wikipedia for a great amount of its content as well. Sticking strictly to "featured articles" and perhaps including the "Good Articles", Wikipedia has been able to produce about 15,000 articles that are of a pretty high quality that are comparable to a professional encyclopedia. These articles do need to be peer-reviewed (as in a Wikipedia peer, not necessarily an academic peer) in order to get this classification. That is the sum total of all of the articles that Citizendium is even working on, including new starts that may not likely ever get finished.

Compared to the 1200 articles produced by the Standford effort, it seems to pale in comparison.

I'm glad to see that there is some effort to make a difference and at least try to make an improvement in the process, but count me as a skeptic in terms of if there might be some real difference with these alternative and their having better success than Wikipedia. Nupedia ultimately bombed, and I don't see this effort by Stanford to be any different.

Re:Academics

[DingerX]

If there's been absolutely no research on the topic in five years, it has no business in a 1200-entry academic encyclopedia.

Re:Academics

[David Gerard]

It's terribly sad, but Citizendium died some time ago. It has about 20 regulars left. Larry Sanger had to be phoned by one of the constables when he couldn't be found for three weeks and they needed him to approve holding a charter vote.

Re:Academics

[maxwell demon]

Why? I'm no philosopher, but taking an example from math: An article about natural numbers isn't likely to get outdated in five years, yet any mathematical encyclopedia would be incomplete without it. Likewise, a physics encyclopedia would certainly include Kepler's laws, but nothing new will likely be found out about them in the next five years. I don't see why such subjects should not exist in philosophy.

Re:Academics

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

I have made littlebit similar notice, but only on articles what are not about technology or other subjects what are close to religion kind fanatisism. Few examples. Wikipedia articles about Ubuntu, Linux kernel, Linux, Operating System are pretty badly against each others.

But then articles about topics what normal 15 years old kid does not know or care, are in much better state. Like some biological or chemical articles (animals, plants so on) or mathematical articles (you have difficult to add misinformation about mathematical formula as there are more who can actually calculate and spot the errors.

Still not a single source is enough reliable. We always need to check few different sources. And if just possible, from few different times from all of them. From the beginning, from the some part of middle and the newest info. It takes time but it is worth of it. Even as it sometimes demans to call to few different university to ask to whom should be contacted about the topic.

As no one can trust just the information what others told.

As it was said well in the movie Disclosure from 1994, that technology brings us access to the information, but we are still missing the truth.
Wikipedia falls to that point. We have information, lots of it. But we can not find the truth with it. Too many article writers fix one part of the article, but does not read again the whole article checking what is the sum of the information. There are too many clashes in them. Like in the beginning the article say that A was before B. But in end it tells otherwise that B was needed before A could be done. And then people just citate the wanted part from the wikipedia article from the wanted part. It is like a bible. You can make anything from it what you just want.

And all that will be always going around the loop, like the questions "Which one was first, chicken or the egg?" or "is the glass half full or half empty?" (Yeah, there are many articles explaining how they are but they are just proofint the point itself).

As long as we have people who are driven by ego, greed, credits or just wanted to be funny and abusive... (etc.) We can not trust wikipedia. As example for the GNU people. They can not even agree with themselfs what HURD is. It is like politics, every party is saying other parties are just copy-cats from their goals.

It is just best to move to country and start growing own food and build up a ZEN garden and live hapily.

Re:Academics

[Fri13]

But the Googles Wave was there to fix that problem.... oh wait... it did not work either for big group of the people as everyone was fixing each others work.

Re:Academics

[epine]

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:

His work touched every field of mathematical logic, if it was not in most cases their original stimulus.

What a thicket of weasel words only an academic could love. There's not a primitive element of this statement that any pair of logicians would reliably agree upon. It's a statement of rough consensus right out of statistical mechanics. List every field of mathematical logic? Different lists. Which of his works touched these fields? Different lists. "I never touched upon that woman." List of cases (is that a euphemism for "publications"?) over which to evaluate the majority predicate most? Different lists.

It's one part sentiment and three parts genuflect. The writer is declaring by means of this stylistic dodge "I'm trying not to bore you so close to the beginning, so I'm saving up the deep breathing for later".

I'm personally not that keen on sole authorship moderated by graphite rods. If Feynman wrote it, F the committee review. If Gell-Mann wrote it, F the committee review. If Feynman and Gell-Mann wrote it together, and a committee polished it up until I can't tell the difference, F the end result.

The only reason the writer here is at risk of boring anyone so early in the article is this vague navigating around petty rivalries.

Why not a simple declarative sentence? "In addition to originating the research program in metamathetics, Godel made seminal contributions to x, y, and z; primary contributions to u, v, and w; and touched on almost everything in between." God forbid, that would never pass academic review. People might disagree on the boundary between w and x. International bun fights might result.

Wikipedia navigates around this in an interesting way. It's permissible to cite authoritative voices making concrete lists (i.e. not excessively under the thumb of onerous vetting) on a one-shot basis. Entire paragraphs are pastiched with concrete facts supplied by a different authority in every phrase or sentence. Reminds me of resampling statistics. For all its faults, it's less dry than one voice trying to please everyone until long after most readers have ceased reading.

I'm all for less veneration of sausage and more realism about sausage factories.

Another feature of Wikipedia that I like is that the citations are biased toward accessibility. Not having free electronic access to a state-of-the-art research library, it matters when it comes to verifying a fact whether I have convenient access to the source in question. Sometimes on Wikipedia I trust the lofty sources behind the mighty paywalls less than the merely competent source that's freely accessible. Which of those citations was more thoroughly reviewed by the unwashed freetards? Many fields could be quoting Shockley on eugenics and I wouldn't (initially) know the difference. Nor am I going to pop $35 every time I harbour a dark suspicion, so paywall authorities are largely useless.

OTOH, when it comes time to achieve a firm foundation for rigorous hair-splitting, I'm sure SEP shines supernova bright compared to communal candle wax. For the most part, one needs profound expertise in a field to fully appreciate rigorous hair-splitting. First you have to know exactly how the hair was mounted in the diamond anvil. That's one percent of us, one percent of the time.

Re:Academics

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people have noted that the smaller the real world implications of a conflict is the more time people spend on the conflict itself.

There's even a name, which I don't remember, for it.

Since 99.99% of everything in academia doesn't have significant real-world implications that go beyond the salary you get at the end of the month, conflicts tend to run wild.

Re:Academics

[takowl]

Exactly. This is why Wikipedia is getting keen on citations and reliable sources. It can't be authoritative itself, but it can point you at sources that are.

Re:Academics

[garutnivore]

I can't talk about other fields but in the humanities, the pay for writing an encyclopedia article is really minimal. As for tenure, encyclopedia articles do not count because an encyclopedia article does not contribute to the advancement of the field. The problem with Wikipedia is not tenure or pay but the fact that uninformed idiots can ruin the contributions of someone who knows what he is talking about.

Re:Academics

[Omestes]

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 wrong, and deserve all the ridicule I get.

I don't understand the birth of this new flavor of relativism and anti-elitism. How the hell did EVERY lunatic opinion become worthy of debate, especially if it comes from someone completely uninformed, since, obviously, people who have devoted their lives to a field MUST be wrong. Damn elitists! They should realize that your average NASCAR and Fox news watching high school graduate is far more capable of grasping academic aspects of reality than someone who spent time mastering it.

I do understand, actually. All the idiots want to be right, since their golden little opinions must be right, or else they wouldn't have faith^W^Wbelieve in them.

Re:Academics

[Artifakt]

If the article does not go into the present situation much, maybe. But let's examine a real basic online article about the natural numbers. Probably no one has said anything new there at least since Godel trumped the Principia, but what if the article mentions schools where outstanding living experts on the subject teach, or publications? Those things can change pretty quickly.
Right now, a cheap, dirty, and not to be trusted for anything serious by itself search (wikipedia) turns up an online article on "Proofs involving the Addition of Natural Numbers", with this as its only print citation:

Edmund Landau, Foundations of Analysis, Chelsea Pub Co. ISBN 0-8218-2693-X.

Is that book still in print? Is it widely used? Maybe most colleges these days use some other text, or that's the 4th edition being cited and Dr. Landau, doubtless a tireless author, has written the 5th, and it comes with a nice shiny CD! A genuine expert source might check those things. 5 years is probably a pretty good rule of thumb to update those sorts of references.

Maybe the four links at the bottom of the page are not sufficient for lay readers - in fact, this is just my arrogant opinion as a guy who does math as a hobby, far from a pro, but links to the definitions of all sorts of other numbers by types and to proofs involving them could be useful. This article contains a link to the definition page for binary operations, but not one to proofs involving transcendental or imaginary or compound numbers, or to their definitions. A few pros, looking back over that article, would probably spot the need and maybe fix it.

And ultimately, the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture is one of the remaining Millennium Prize problems, and it's about determining when complex equations have either a finite or an infinite set of whole number solutions (rather than no whole number solutions at all), so just maybe the article will be outdated someday. (What's the half-life of a Millennium Prize problem? Probably much more than 5 years.).

Re:Academics

[thrawn_aj]

My experience in academia taught me that there was no such thing as the "authoritative" source.

Let me guess - you're not in the physical sciences (NTTAWWT - just bugs me when even academics aren't upfront about their field, choosing instead to say "academia". If I were in a worse mood, I'd almost suspect it's a camouflage mechanism =)). What you allude to is the one thing that I absolutely hated about the sole philosophy class I took. We talked endlessly about history - i.e. who had what ideas and when. The actual ideas are (for some reason) so revered that incorrect ones are still discussed as if they had merit (again, just a different opinion). Of course, I shouldn't be taken too seriously in this regard - perhaps they actually knock down bad ideas in higher-level courses? Just seems like a waste of paper when certain ideas have been shown (empirically) to be rubbish, to consider "opposing viewpoints" with such delicacy. *shrug*

Re:Academics

[thrawn_aj]

If you say it is about a giant, glowing, purple duck, then you are 100% wrong.

Uh uh! When I imagined the scene where he drowns that poor girl, there was a giant, glowing, purple duck in the background, staring sadly at the spectacle (and quacking mournfully at the vicissitudes of fate =(). That oughta make me at least 2% correct =).

/Inane banter aside, I obviously agree with you =)

Re:Academics

[thrawn_aj]

Since 99.99% of everything in academia doesn't have significant real-world implications that go beyond the salary you get at the end of the month, conflicts tend to run wild.

In other news, 99.99% of ACs are full of shit. See how easy it is to puke meaningless statistics. Next time, try to give it at least as much thought as you'd give to deciding on what to have for dinner.

Re:Academics

[thrawn_aj]

Because (and I'm not being snarky here), philosophy is not bound by the laws of reality. The Sokal hoax (full snark ahead) should have destroyed any remaining illusions of that, eh? All that means is that philosophers are free to dredge up any old idea and treat it as if it were a matter of debate. For instance, you still have dualism-monism debates, when neuroscience has long transcended those feeble paradigms. Examples abound.

Re:Academics

[thrawn_aj]

Wish I had mod points! Excellent summary. Thread over I'd say :)

Re:Academics

[thrawn_aj]

Ok, I have to ask - exactly where do you folks find these alleged incompetents? And why do you not do anything about it? There are department chairs, instructor evaluations and a host of other venues to complain about this. Clearly, these schools are such mountains of rot that they are accumulating these bad seed professors like flies on garbage. I appear to have been extraordinarily lucky in my choice of schools - something I'm more and more grateful for every time I see a post like yours. This isn't high school we're talking about - where the teachers are generally authoritarian pricks. This is college - where you can call out the bastards if they're wrong and they have to sit there and fucking take it!

Re:Academics

[westlake]

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.

The Britannica in its prime had a tradition of good writing.

When the subject was Charles Dickens the author was G.K. Chesterton.

Re:Academics

[Antisyzygy]

Actually, academic papers in scientific journals undergo various levels of rigor of peer review. For a sound academic article, one uses other academic articles as a source that have been deemed useful and correct by a committee of people who generally have quite a bit of knowledge of the subject matter. So, its not like some dickhead in his ivory tower decides what is or isn't, its that a bunch of dickheads sit in an office and decide what should be published based on consensus between their various biases. The group is a better alternative in my opinion.

Re:Academics

[Anonymous Coward]

Had The Convention on Cluster Munitions included a section on cluster fucks, more countries now absent from the list of signatories would surely have appeared there..

Re:Academics

[maxwell demon]

I was not disputing that there may be new contributions to old subjects. I was disputing the claim that a subject which doesn't change in five years doesn't belong in an encyclopedia.

Re:Academics

[DingerX]

More precisely, philosophy establishes the bounds of reality. Neuroscience does a great job of explaining how brains work, but a crappy job of explaining how humans can discuss neuroscience: it's the triple question mark between underpants and profit.

Re:Academics

[DingerX]

The subject may not change, but the terms of the scholarly debate do. If an idea is "outdated", then there will be research on the history of the idea.

Re:Academics

[Vintermann]

In most academic domains including philosophy there is broad agreement on what positions are reasonable.

Well, how could there not be, considering already established "philosophers" effectively get to choose their successors? It doesn't mean they are right. It absolutely does not mean that they are focusing on the right issues.

To their credit, and unlike other professions, some of them recognize the problem (what Popper wrote on it in "The open society and its enemies" was IMH non-professional O very poignant. But it doesn't appear philosophy departments have done much to attempt to solve the problem.)

Re:Academics

[yyxx]

It means that what you've said can be backed up by someone else with supposed expertise.

Expertise shouldn't actually matter (that's why we have blind reviewing). What matters is that the experiments have been carried out and described properly, that the work is described in sufficient detail to be reproducible, and that proofs are correct.

Re:Academics

[nine-times]

Well you aren't always citing the direct proof of an experiment. Again, the point isn't necessarily that what you're quoting is 100% correct, but that when someone says, "where did you get that idea?" you can point to a particular person and say, "This is what he said and these are his credentials."

Re:Academics

[radtea]

I don't understand the birth of this new flavor of relativism and anti-elitism. How the hell did EVERY lunatic opinion become worthy of debate,

Innumeracy.

That, and political savvy on the part of the American Right, who have taken become the dominant force in politics in the past twenty years by abandoning their traditional form of innumeracy and embracing that of the Left.

The argument goes like this, and dates back to pre-scientific days:

Innumerate A: "There is ONE right way."

Inumerate B: "Look, I can show that there are two wanys that both seem equally right."

Innumerate A: "Impossible! If that were true then ANY way would do! If there's more than ONE, ALL must be permitted! THERE IS NO TRUTH!"

Innumerate B: "That's right!"

That reality can constrain our thinking without determining it is too complex a concept for either the average Lefty or Righty to grasp, and both have recognized the benefits of Humpty Dumpty Epistemology to their cause (all that matters is "who shall be the master.")

Re:Academics

[divisionbyzero]

In most academic domains including philosophy there is broad agreement on what positions are reasonable.

Well, how could there not be, considering already established "philosophers" effectively get to choose their successors? It doesn't mean they are right. It absolutely does not mean that they are focusing on the right issues.

To their credit, and unlike other professions, some of them recognize the problem (what Popper wrote on it in "The open society and its enemies" was IMH non-professional O very poignant. But it doesn't appear philosophy departments have done much to attempt to solve the problem.)

Of course it doesn't. I wasn't suggesting that it did. I was simply pointing out to the parent that arriving at an authoritative set of positions is not impossible. Whether they are correct or not is of course up for debate.

Yes, Popper (who was surprisingly resistant to criticism) made a lot of good suggestions about how to incorporate criticism into developing ides. His "Conjectures and Refutations" is useful here.

Re:Academics

[Teancum]

Even as dead as it is, it still is the best alternative to Wikipedia... provided you want to have access to the content and use it under some sort of copyleft license instead of a purely proprietary license. Even this Standford "encyclopedia" is not available under a copyleft license and can only be viewed from this one website alone.... or something published by Standford.

Re:Academics

[thrawn_aj]

More precisely, philosophy establishes the bounds of reality.

By negation perhaps :p. I'm sorry, philosophy has many functions, but "establishing the bounds of reality" is something it has rarely (if ever) actually done.

Neuroscience does a great job of explaining how brains work, but a crappy job of explaining how humans can discuss neuroscience

That's probably true, but unless you're going to suggest (ha!) that philosophy fills that role, I fail to see how that's relevant to the matter at hand. I imagine neuroscientists (of which I am not one) are probably far more capable of speculating about such things than philosophers.

Re:Academics

[thrawn_aj]

Ah, I see now. Still, you see my point. Apparently, philosophers themselves do not see any question as laid to rest in any sense of the phrase. THAT is the problem here. If anything can be brought up for debate and any idea considered worthy regardless of its status in other areas of inquiry (such as resolved problems in the sciences), how could honest consensus ever be established? It can't, except thru fiat (the victory of "schools of thought" through mere agglomeration). All that is (I think) the reason behind the rejection of the 5-year rule you mentioned.

As the old joke goes: the physicist needs a lab and tons of equipment; the mathematician needs only a chalkboard, chalk and eraser; the philosopher doesn't even need the eraser. :)

Re:Academics

[thrawn_aj]

By the way, I just realized that my reply to you was embarrassingly snarky and there was no call for that on my part - I apologize. Please ignore the snark but I think the underlying questions are still valid - I'd love to continue that discussion.

Re:Academics

[Anonymous Coward]

Teach the controversy!

Re:Academics

[maxwell demon]

Well, you cannot rely on matters to be settled in other sciences either. For example, for long time it looked as if Newtonian Physics as base theory were settled once and for all. The only thing which wasn't just a reformulation of it was electrodynamics with its continuous fields, and it didn't really seem to scratch on its fundamentals. And then in 20th century, relativity and quantum mechanics overthrew all the base postulates Newtonian physics was based on, and degraded Newtonian physics to an approximation for high actions, low speeds and low masses.

Re:Academics

[jd]

I very much agree with you, which is why I'm absolutely in favour of keeping peer-review. Ultimately, though, it should be one filter out of several rather than the sole filter, which should deal with the need to question authority without rejecting the authoritative.

If someone can come up with an alternative method that can identify valuable work that would be rejected by peer-review without producing a significantly higher ratio of false positives to true positives than peer-review, it should not replace peer-review but be used in parallel. I don't see any serious scientist objecting to something that stringent. On the other hand, anything more relaxed and academics would rip it to shreds as burdening them with nonsense.

On the flip-side, academics are already being burdened with things that, frankly, are fairly obviously bogus but are accepted because it has become traditional to accept them. There needs to be an added layer that forces appropriate questioning, with the understanding that academics need freedom to think and play with ideas that are neither obvious nor necessarily entirely rational, but that excess exposure to non-obvious, non-rational ideas that are also nonsensical merely burns brain cycles for no purpose.

This is razor-edge stuff, because you can't add excessive latency and you can't add excessive burdens, but at the same time you also can't damage the freedoms that are essential. Although what I describe might sound ok, I don't know if implementing it would even be possible.

Re:Academics

[Omestes]

Which one? Your pet theory versus facts, or everyone else's versus yours?

Thats the thing I love about creationism, I'm guessing that the "teach the controversy" people would get really mad about teaching EVERY creation myth from every large culture throughout history.

"Well Billy, the nasty scientists say something about natural selection, but in truth we actually came from a big space egg."

I wouldn't see they have room to complain though, since there is just as much factual evidence for the origin of man via giant space egg, as there is from the Judeo-Christian sky man.

Re:Academics

[yyxx]

you can point to a particular person and say, "This is what he said and these are his credentials."

No, you point to a particular paper and say "this paper established this fact, and you can read there how it did that". "Credentials" don't enter into that.

Notice that scientific papers usually do not list academic titles, degrees, or credentials for authors.

Re:Academics

[nine-times]

Again, you aren't always citing the direct proof of an experiment. Sometimes the paper does not exactly "establish the fact", but you can assert that you're claiming a fact by virtue of it being claimed in some other academic work. By referencing that work, you allow your reader to do research of their own to evaluate the reliability of the claim.

If you think credentials don't enter into it, you're naive.

Re:Academics

[thrawn_aj]

Indeed. But you happened to pinpoint the precise difference between the two. A convergence, if you will, in the hard sciences and a lack of it in philosophy and the softer sciences (mind you, this is in no way meant to be an indictment of these fields, sometimes a lack of hardness is exactly what's called for).

My meaning should become clear when you consider that once a paradigm is overthrown, you don't get physicists or biologists or chemists dredging up the overthrown stuff and claiming that those old paradigms are actually better suited to explaining reality. You won't have any sane person claiming that Socrates had a better grasp of kinematics than Galileo (or that Newtonian mechanics has more predictive and explanatory power than SR (and so on to GR).

You see the directionality? It's the difference between a damped oscillator (that eventually relaxes to an equilibrium) and an undamped one (for softer fields) or even a negatively dampled one (for things like politics - where the disagreements just keep on amplifying ;)).

Re:Academics

[thrawn_aj]

Sorry, neglected to state my main point. Because of that difference I pointed out, the hard sciences tend to have much more stable equilibria. You need BOTH (1) a perceived problem with the current consensus and (2) an actual alternative to supplant it with. The latter is extraordinarily difficult to come by as time goes on (and differences between rival worldviews get more and more subtle). This is why encyclopedias of science (i.e. the basic principles according to consensus) remain current much longer than others. Even when there are feverish battles for consensus, it is more in the vein of two princes dueling it out while the old king stays on the throne until there's a clear winner.

Re:Academics

[Anonymous Coward]

arguing for half an hour over where the place the word 'the'.

Let me guess -- you were the lone holdout?

Re:Academics

[Eunuchswear]

Well, I was with you there until you got to this bit:

If I say Sartre's Being and Nothingness is about smurfs, I am wrong, and deserve all the ridicule I get.

WTF? You didn't get all the Smurf references? Probably because they're called "Les Schtroumpfs" in the original French. Maybe you've been reading a bad translation.

Irrelevant Wikipedia reference to like totally prove my point: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Schtroumpfs.

Re:Academics

[yyxx]

Again, you aren't always citing the direct proof of an experiment. Sometimes the paper does not exactly "establish the fact", but you can assert that you're claiming a fact by virtue of it being claimed in some other academic work.

Yes, and you give the reference so that people can look up that paper. If, instead, you write "Prof. Smith told me and he has two PhD's so it must be true, people are going to laugh at you.

If you think credentials don't enter into it, you're naive.

Well, what you had for lunch probably enters into it, but it shouldn't. If you were supposed to use credentials, they'd be listed on papers, but they aren't usually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credential

Re:Academics

[nine-times]

Yes, and you give the reference so that people can look up that paper. If, instead, you write "Prof. Smith told me and he has two PhD's so it must be true, people are going to laugh at you.

If you say, "Prof. Smith said so in his paper, and his paper said he did an experiment so it must be true!" you'll get laughed at, too. Or if not, you should be.

Re:Academics

[yyxx]

But if you say "Smith [1] demonstrated this fact in his paper" and [1] is a peer reviewed publication, you won't get laughed at. Note the absence of credentials.

It is getting pretty popular, actually

[bbtom]

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.

Re:It is getting pretty popular, actually

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I used it very often when I was taking a load of philosophy and constitutional theory classes last year. Wikipedia was specifically banned from being used as a resource, but this site became a valuable resource for the entire class during the semester. While it's limited articles was a detriment, when the content was there, it was accurate, insightful and invaluable.

It won't replace or even compete with Wikipedia, but it should start showing up in the citations of Wiki soon (if not already). It will also be a good resource for other academics look for more than a general overview of a topic.

Re:It is getting pretty popular, actually

[Itninja]

All I know is this: if I can't ctrl-a, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, grep out all special characters, then take that and ctrl-a, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v into a Slashdot comment to appear learned, and then delete the article to cover my tracks....it's not a valid source of information.

Re:It is getting pretty popular, actually

[I'm Not There (1956)]

Moreover, why are we comparing this to Wikipedia? The point about Wikipedia is that everybody can edit it. Before Wikipedia all the encyclopedias were like Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and there are still lots of them. We actually need both of these kinds of encyclopedias. Indeed SEP is a great encyclopedia, adapted very well for the web, and fortunately free for all the readers, but just because it's published on the web doesn't mean we have to compare it with Wikipedia.

Re:It is getting pretty popular, actually

[edremy]

I'll second this. I'm teaching a course that includes a lot of philosophy of science this semester which is waaaay outside my normal comfort zone (I'm a chemist by training) and the SEoP has been a really useful resource. It's pretty accessible and I have a lot higher comfort level in the material there than a place like Wikipedia.

Re:It is getting pretty popular, actually

[bbtom]

You should probably be looking at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy too. I've found that roughly my reading pattern when I hit a new topic in philosophy is: IEP, SEP, textbooks, monographs, research papers. Some of the SEP articles - especially in philosophy of language and epistemology - can be a little intimidating and get into the logical symbolism a bit too rapidly. The IEP articles are a little gentler, and are definitely suitable for undergraduates in a way that some of the SEP articles aren't.

Good Way to Compare

[medv4380]

The problem Wikipedia has is comparing it to other digital encyclopedias. Ether this will prove to be a better academic way to source work, or it will be a bureaucratic nightmare and die due to the lack of information. I don't see why it would work if they think they'll only get 1200 articles though. What makes any encyclopedia good is a high volume of content not just quality.

Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's copy these articles into Wikipedia, so they're actually of use to someone.

Re:Awesome!

[MrEricSir]

Would that be legal?

Re:Awesome!

[AffidavitDonda]

At least some of them are already linked in Wiki. I just checked the article about John Searle's "Chinese Room" and it contains a link to Stanford Encyclopaedia's article by David Cole.

Re:Awesome!

[Danh]

No, it's not legal to copy the articles to Wikipedia, since they grant no other right than free view. See their copyright: basically the author retains the copyright, and grants Stanford the right to publish the article electronically.

Re:Awesome!

[tibman]

I think facts can be copied with a citation to the source?

Re:Awesome!

[AffidavitDonda]

Same for the article about Alan Turing, you find te links under "References" or "External Links"

Re:Awesome!

[allknowingfrog]

True. It's not possible to copyright a fact. However, the question at hand was whether whole articles can be "borrowed." In order to cite facts, someone must be willing to write those facts into a new article. On the other hand, most of these topics are probably covered already in Wikipedia, so maybe a quick citation wouldn't be such a problem after all.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a question?

Re:Awesome!

[swillden]

But they can be cited from Wikipedia, and the information within them reproduced in Wikipedia.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, let's copy the factual information from these articles (facts can't be copyrighted, right?), and link to them as a source.

Tough crowd here

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:Tough crowd here

[brian0918]

No empirically-testable system of ethics? Then it's crap!

Re:Tough crowd here

[Maxo-Texas]

A non scottish system of ethics? Then it's crap!

Re:Tough crowd here

[divisionbyzero]

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 the least scientific and the most dogmatic. As long as philosophy doesn't try to be or claim to be science there is no problem here. They serve complementary functions.

Re:Tough crowd here

[Anonymous Coward]

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 discipline.

On the other hand, I've seen what gets classified under 'metaphysics' in the bookstore so I can't blame the laymen for not understanding what philosophy is actually about.

Re:Tough crowd here

[oliverthered]

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 system, though some people are said to be more authoritative without merit (ie the subject is a philosophical one, like mathematics and not an empirically testable one like umm.... philosophy)

Re:Tough crowd here

[firewrought]

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.

Everybody knows that we are all philosophers. The empiricist also knows that we aren't very good philosophers: that there are all sorts of weird hiccups in human reasoning that lead us to mistake thought for truth. Unless constantly checked against the real world, it's all too easy for an entire field of knowledge (*cough* cultural studies) to wander into the dark, taking with it the energies of countless institutions and entire generations of scholars. For knowledge to be meaningful, it must be tested. Mathematics, with its inhuman capacity for strict formalism, is the only field that gets a bye.

Philosophy has her triumphs, but she prefers to celebrate false heroes and dead ends. It's a shame because we do need philosophy and better ways of going about it.

Re:Tough crowd here

[Maxo-Texas]

man... no Austin Powers fans here today!

Re:Tough crowd here

[Doctor Morbius]

A field of study that can produce nonsense like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie deserves negative opinions.

Re:Tough crowd here

[jjohnson]

If you'd like, I can come over and we can empirically test some ethical quandaries.

Re:Tough crowd here

[jpmorgan]

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 has been relegated largely to obscurity.

Re:Tough crowd here

[CRCulver]

Should we toss quantum physics out too just because Schroedinger used a fanciful example of a cat?

Re:Tough crowd here

[Anonymous Coward]

i think you mean:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

Re:Tough crowd here

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't noticed this, but an interesting statement. My first college philosophy class involved learning Hyperproof. I say structured reasoning should be taught in high school.

Re:Tough crowd here

[funkatron]

Trouble is, philosophical writing is pretty variable. It can deliver great works which advance our understanding of the world but it can also deliver dense texts which don't seem to say a whole lot. Add to this the fact that some of the greats need a lot historical context to make sense (for instance, try reading Kant without knowing which problems he was trying to solve) and you have a situation where someone who selects the wrong book as an introduction to philosophy can be left with a pretty negative view of the field.

Re:Tough crowd here

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that much of philosophy currently exists to abstract away from "vital questions in everyday life". One needs only look at how useless much of moral philosophy is with its obsession with trolley dilemmas and the (often) dismissive attitude held towards applied ethics. That there even needs to be a field called "applied" ethics should be proof enough.

Re:Tough crowd here

[null8]

Philosophy should be more empirically testable to be anything more than a nice past time. How about "if you kick someone, he kicks back" a nice basis for a Rule of ethic, like "don't hit others". Very empirically testable. On the other hand, you can try to answer the question "Why are we here?" all you life, and 42 is as good an answer as any. And because of that, calling philosophy a science is an offense on science, because in the philosophy, as we know it, has nothing to do with science, like in testable hypotheses, more with trying to find an answer for things, that accept .* answers.

Re:Tough crowd here

[steelfood]

Empiricism itself is a philosophical concept. There's a school of thought named after it.

And while people think it's a simple thing, it's actually rather complex. Most philosophers agree that you can't discover Truth. Where they disagree upon is the degree of certainty in which an idea no longer needs questioning and becomes accepted as factual. Heck, the very idea that it can be done at all is subject to debate.

I find it funny that people here can whip out the old "correlation != causation" argument at any mention of a study's conclusion, but don't actually understand that this actually comes from the philosophical idea that empirical proof != necessarily true.

Re:Tough crowd here

[maxwell demon]

Is Austin Powers empirically testable?

Re:Tough crowd here

[MindlessAutomata]

What are you talking about? You don't understand why moral propositions aren't empirically testable (indeed, they are values and not facts) and science is basically the "technology" of philosophy. Philosophy has everything to do with science, and if you don't know why, then that's because you're extremely ignorant, particularly about epistemology.

Re:Tough crowd here

[null8]

Moral propositions are testable, like "don't do harm to others" or "do harm to others" or "help others" or "don't help others". I mean you can test them and find which is more useful for you. So from your words if science is the true subset of philosophy, then you yourself say that philosophy is not science. Anyway, the philosophy I had at school had a lot to do with analysing Ideas of some authors, it was good as it was a source of new thinking patterns, but it didn't have any testable results, all theories were valid, and there wasn't much knowledge that proved to be useful. Well maybe I am the one who doesn't know that he doesn't knows but till today my impression of philosophy as computer scientist is that it's good for writing books but not for getting work done.

Re:Tough crowd here

[JohnFluxx]

Meh. Scientists pretty much universally agree that the concept of "Truth" is nonsense. In my experience, anyone that starts saying 'Truth' is a crackpot.

But it is philosophy that starts making grand statements about The Truth.

Re:Tough crowd here

[JohnFluxx]

> Specifically metaphysics (the study of the nature of existence)

And after producing science - a testable empirical version - metaphysics has produced nothing useful.

> If you are doing physical science you are assuming certain metaphysical and epistemic conclusions

So philisophers like to claim. But in reality science simply tries to construct models that fit what we think our senses say. If they predict what our senses will say tomorrow, then they are useful and can be used to build devices etc. Since this appears to have worked well (computers etc etc), we might as well keep on doing it.
Nothing there required any of the crap that philosophy has produced.

> Combine that with the fact that another areas of philosophy, logic, underlies mathematics and you have one very fundamental discipline.

Yes, before science philosophy produced a lot of useful things, such as logic and science. But now it's useless. Now you have rubbish like 'modal logic'.

> On the other hand, I've seen what gets classified under 'metaphysics' in the bookstore so I can't blame the laymen for not understanding what philosophy is actually about.

The best philosophy is when it's not. The best modern philosophers are those who dislike philosophy and argue for science.

Re:Tough crowd here

[JohnFluxx]

Philosophy used to be related to science - producing logic and empiricism. Then science branched one way and philosophy the other. Modern philosophy has nothing to do with science now.

Re:Tough crowd here

[JohnFluxx]

There is nothing philosophical about ethics. Just because philosophers waste so much time on it, doesn't mean it's their domain to conclude about.

Ethics is pure science. Go out and ask people if something is ethical. If they mostly say it is ethical, then it's you can conclude that most people think it's ethical.

You could produce a testable model to try to predict whether people will say something ethical. And you could find the part of the brain, dna, etc that makes ethical judgements. But this is still all science and can be tested. Philosophy has no role.

Re:Tough crowd here

[Antisyzygy]

Unless you can prove me wrong, ethics are totally subjective to culture, and perhaps even our own evolution towards social animals. I.e. perhaps human beings evolved society as a survival mechanism and thus our ethics are culturally biased to whichever culture survived best in our cultural ancestors climate. I am not saying Philosophy is not a valid discipline, but scientists take it with a grain of salt because there is absolutely no way to verify one course of action over the other through some experimental model. E.g. Say if we run biological experiments on 10000 infants which would result in their death 99 percent of the time, we could potentially save 50000 adult humans who are terminally ill. Is ethical to sacrifice 10000 infants to save 50000 adults? Adults can procreate, they can work for the society, they have experience and knowledge an infant does not have. Adults may have families which include children and they provide for these children. An infant can procreate some day, but their future works are an unknown. Perhaps some day collectively the 10000 infants could have have more knowledge or more experience than all of the adults combined, but its taking a risk to society to choose them to survive over the adults since it introduces an unknown. Additionally, they are also innocent and have not done anything "ethically" wrong to deserve this treatment. Most people in the first worlds would probably choose the infants to survive over the adults based on their own maternal and paternal instincts. Most people from 1000 years ago would say, "Screw the infants, its just one more mouth to feed". How can science be applied to situations that change so dramatically between cultures like this? Maybe I have just justified the existence of Philosophy.

Re:Tough crowd here

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because there are too many ass-burger mofos here on slashdot. They have no screen for all the BS in the life.

I'll tell you what's the problem with philosophy. There were basically two bright figures:

- Hume: He pointed out some shit repeating bazillion time gives you no logical justification to imply it will happen again just the same.
- Russell: He put substance into philosophy by melting it with math.

Nobody follows Hume because it's god damn dead end. Very few follows Russell because if they did, they would be in math dept, not in philosophy dept. Why would they bother with all that nasty math stuff when they can happily bullshit their way in philo dept with other bullshitters, rambling on about Plato and Buddha?

That leaves the philosophy dept with bunch of half-assed bullshitters. That's why we piss on philosophy wankers.

Ethics? Listen, kido. You dig down, it all comes down to competition for survival - we ally, we connive, we sacrifice, and we backstab, all ultimately on that route. That's why life is a logical hell.

Hope somebody smacks you upside the head so that you'll wake up. Or not. Like I care.

Re:Tough crowd here

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Should we toss quantum physics out too just because Schroedinger used a fanciful example of a cat?

Schroedinger used a cat as an example; he didn't base his whole argument on it or claim that the example served as evidence. As far as I can tell, a lot of people think that the "philosophical zombie" concept actually proves something. That's the difference in a nutshell.

Re:Tough crowd here

[Anonymous Coward]

We respect Kant and Wittgenstein but... Derrida? Sartre?

Get your own school free of nonsense and people will respect it.

Re:Tough crowd here

[Anonymous Coward]

"And after producing science - a testable empirical version - metaphysics has produced nothing useful."

Said the metaphysical naturalist. I have opinions too! But physics can't prove metaphysics. You have to actually do metaphysics. That is a philosophical endeavor. This doesn't interest you. That's fine.

"...science simply tries to construct models that fit what we think our senses say. If they predict what our senses will say tomorrow, then they are useful and can be used to build devices etc. Since this appears to have worked well (computers etc etc), we might as well keep on doing it. Nothing there required any of the crap that philosophy has produced."

You are confusing what is useful with what is true. Engineering success does not, cannot, and historically has not proved the theories on which it is based. Engineering success and the truth values of physical theories are not connected. Engineering doesn't need them to be connected. If Stephen Hawking invents a better toaster based on assumptions in string theory, he isn't assuming any metaphysical conclusions. If he claims the Universe created itself out of nothing and can do it again any day of the week, he IS.

"Now you have rubbish like 'modal logic'."

Yes, god forbid we explore and clarify thought and language. And we have the gall to think we are doing something important!

"The best modern philosophers are those who dislike philosophy and argue for science."

Then obviously you are one of the best modern philosophers, and I shouldn't be arguing with you! We should let Stanford know. I'm sure they'll give you an honorary Doctorate.

Re:Tough crowd here

[dwye]

> As far as I can tell, a lot of people think that the "philosophical zombie" concept actually proves something.

It does. What it proves is that some philosophers shouldn't philosophize in public.

Re:Tough crowd here

[JohnFluxx]

> But physics can't prove metaphysics.

Which is why metaphysics is useless.

> You are confusing what is useful with what is true.

No, I'm not. 'Truth' is pointless and a waste of time. We can never ever find out "the truth". Yet philosophy pretends to try to. And gets nowhere.

> Engineering success does not, cannot, and historically has not proved the theories on which it is based.

Right, noone has claimed it does. But Engineering seems to work, so we will continue doing it given the lack of better alternatives.

> Engineering success and the truth values of physical theories are not connected.

Exactly. That's what makes physics and engineering better than philosophy.

> If he claims the Universe created itself out of nothing and can do it again any day of the week, he IS.

This is a bit borderline imho, maybe science will provide some light on this issue in the future. Either way, metaphysics certainly won't give us anything useful.

> Yes, god forbid we explore and clarify thought and language. And we have the gall to think we are doing something important!

No, computer linguists try to formally define language, and come up with logic models to express idea.

Philosophers instead seem to only want to prove that God exists by using modal logic to show that a possible necessary God must be necessary yadda yadda.

> Then obviously you are one of the best modern philosophers, and I shouldn't be arguing with you!

Quite possibly, it seems the good scientists and good atheists make better philosophers than people call themselves philosophers.

As Feynman said, "Shut-up and calculate" :-)

Re:Tough crowd here

[Lundse]

Also, dismissing a discipline without empirical testing is holding it to a non-empirical yardstick - so such an argument does, apparently, accept the non-empirical as valid reasoning. If only we had a discipline that investigated the boundaries of such reasoning...

Yeah, I'm a philosopher (some would say pedant) :-)

Re:Tough crowd here

[m50d]

Go on, what is modern philosophy going to achieve? Is it going to make the science of 100 years from now better (the way the mathematics of today might)? Serious question, yes is a perfectly valid answer.

Yes, science aka natural philosophy grew out of philosophy - but as far as I can see it overtook what we now call "philosophy", which seems like the leftovers of early history of science. The question of how we know science works needs to be asked, but it's asked better by HPS. Logic needs to be done, but it's done better in mathematics than in philosophy. I attended a few philosophy lectures as a student, it seemed to be about 1/3 logic etc. and 2/3 history. Where's the interesting research in contemporary philosophy?

Re:Tough crowd here

[Pinky's Brain]

Pretty much sums up what I think ... philosophy died with Hume, it's not worthless to teach (anything after Hume only to point and laugh at) but it's worthless to try to progress.

Re:Tough crowd here

[MikeBabcock]

I always enjoy a minor philisophical debate about the nature of a belief in science with such people. Even simple questions about the nature of science very quickly become philosophy ... often unrecognized.

Re:Tough crowd here

[MikeBabcock]

Your belief that knowledge must be tested is what exactly? What about your definition of "meaningful"? What makes philisophical concepts you dismiss non-meaningful? And those are all philosophical questions I'm tired of asking of people who don't realize their beliefs and prejudices matter.

Re:Tough crowd here

[Anonymous Coward]

You might as well piss on science too; Hume's argument is that inductive reasoning (i.e. the basis of empiricism) is unjustified. Unless you accept his cop-out that we might as well keep relying on induction because we as humans are naturally inclined to do so (why the fuck not? not like we've got anything else going for us).

Re:Tough crowd here

[Anonymous Coward]

You are confused. Science, unlike philosophy, is anchored to the physical nature - if the nature behaves arbitrarily, it is what it is and science adapts to deal with it, unlike philosophy with its infinite imaginary universes.

Well, that's great...

[mcgrew]

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.

Re:Well, that's great...

[trb]

Yes. That's like saying that zappos.com is an authoritative alternative to amazon.com, without mentioning that zappos is limited to shoes.

Re:Well, that's great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mcgrew, I've seen you post a lot the eye problems you have are interesting to me, as I also have some pretty shitty eye problems. I think its time to throw down, here's what I've got:

1. Giant Retinal Tear and detachment in the right eye at age 14, repaired without a buckle.
2. Retina detachment again during theatrical showing of LotR 2 followed by a buckle, vitrectomy and silicone oil.
3. Surgery to remove the oil and replace lens due to oil-induced cataract.
4. Surgery to remove laser induced cataract in left eye.
5. Retinal detachment of the left eye following cataract surgery resulting in a buckle, vitectomy and gas bubble at age 23.

Re:Well, that's great...

[swillden]

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.

Re:Well, that's great...

[mcgrew]

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 a vitrectomy (with the bubble) to reattach it. Luckily I never had to undergo a scleral buckle like you did.

Journaled at slashdot:
Behind My Sig (sig long since changed, it's about cataract surgery)
Vitrectomy (Got my old UID back after these were posted)

I feel sorry for you, you're awful young to have all those problems.

Re:Well, that's great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. That's like saying that zappos.com is an authoritative alternative to amazon.com, without mentioning that zappos is limited to shoes.

...which would have been a great analogy if (1) Zappos only sold shoes and (2) Zappos was not a part of Amazon.

Re:Well, that's great...

[m50d]

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.

These days it isn't, actually. It's tried too hard to be an encyclopaedia, with the notability rules and citations. Other wikis are better at giving you that kind of info.

Re:Well, that's great...

[mcgrew]

citation

If I'd said "track listing for Pietasters Oolooloo... oh wait... I just discovered that I have a rare album (Strapped Live).

Why I Use Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

It has an article for everything. I can find the names of different fallacies, book summaries, the date a movie came out, or info on the latest game by ID Software all in one place. It's up to date, it doesn't need to be perfect that's not the way I use it.

Here, fixed that for you

[Dalzhim]

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.

Re:Here, fixed that for you

[phyrexianshaw.ca]

am I the only one thinking that if you're publishing a grant application on Thomas Aquinas, maybe you should get a fucking life and not worry about where it's published?

Re:Here, fixed that for you

[DingerX]

If you're publishing a grant application, you're doing it wrong, dude.

Re:Here, fixed that for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you are. And I imagine that you often find yourself alone.

Nookable

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been hooked on SEP for about a year. One of my justifying reasons (excuses) to buy a pre price drop Nook was reading these articles in more comfortable format or location. Alas, the web browser is still awful, but I found this wonderful little tool:

http://www.web2fb2.net/

Converts SEP articles (and any other web page) into an EPUB file. It even did a great job rendering the diagram of modal logic systems.

Wrong model.

[chaboud]

Following link after link is exactly why I like Wikipedia. I can cruise by dense information if I already have the background or dig through articles to get the background I need for a particular topic.

On top of that, it really fits well with tabbed browsers, sort of an information nesting-doll model.

The absolutely ridiculous thing is that educational institutions won't take citations from wikipedia, but some will take citations from the internet at large. Understanding fail.

Re:Wrong model.

[Talderas]

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!

Re:Wrong model.

[Anonymous Coward]

Description

Content you can read straight through to find everything pertinent — not hop around following link after link like the regular Wikipedia.

Comment

Following link after link is exactly why I like Wikipedia

Amen. I don't see why anyone sane would want to "read straight through to find everything pertinent". That's why we invented hyperlinks...so you only get the "pertinent" information that you want to get, not the "pertinent" information that the author wants to shove down your throat. Or eyes.

Re:Wrong model.

[melikamp]

I feel you. I gear my work towards free Web publishing these days, and so I do not hesitate to link to Wikipedia if it has something that someone can find relevant or useful. Why the hell not? Linkage is what makes the Web about 1000 times better than the plain text. But I do not automatically hate people who reject Wikipedia citations: since it officially has no original research, there really is no good reason to cite it in print. One should simply paraphrase it while citing the original research.

Re:Wrong model.

[Born2bwire]

That's if you are lucky though. The problem is that Wikipedia cannot force due diligence. How many articles have you seen that have been tagged for years pleading for someone to add citations or to clean up the article? Here's one I found yesterday: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna . Good lengthy article on a very common topic with a lot of detailed information. But ZERO in-line citations.

The readability seems to be questionable.

[EvolutionsPeak]

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.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

The last sentence means, "Given reality, is it reasonable to consider the possibility of Aliens existing when they cannot in fact exist, as their existence would violate the laws of reality?" I'm about to go research this branch of Philosophy now; it is really intriguing.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[phiwum]

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 equivalence on this view, so read with a grain of salt. I'm not familiar with this theory.)

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[ColdWetDog]

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.

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?

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.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Actualism is the philosophical position that everything there is -- everything that can in any sense be said to be -- exists, or is actual. Put another way, actualism denies that there is any kind of being beyond actual existence; to be is to exist, and to exist is to be actual. Actualism therefore stands in stark contrast to possibilism, which, as we've seen, takes the things there are to include possible but non-actual objects."

 
In the alien example an actualist would say that, in some sense, those aliens are actual. This is opposed to possiblism, the view that not all things that are possible are actual.

 
Of course your concerns about readability are entirely correct. Just a bit down in the article it moves into quantified modal logic: x(Sxp Px)

 
All this says is what (7) says, namely "(7) Joseph Ratzinger (i.e., the Pope at the time of this writing, August 2008) could have had a son who could have become a priest." which isn't that complicated, but still. In fact, this is probably one of the more technical articles including gems like this: "The quantified formula 'xPx' is trueM,f at w just in case, for all individuals a in dom(w), 'Px' is trueM,f['x',a] at w, where f['x',a] is f if f('x') = a, and otherwise is just like f except that it assigns a to 'x' instead of f('x')."

 
That's why I always find it amusing when people stereotype philosophy as easy. Contemporary academic philosophy is extraordinarily technical and difficult. Large sections of analytic philosophy are just applied formal logic. This might not say anything about whether it's useful or truth-discovering, but it's certainly difficult. But then I happen to think that metaphysical disputes like this one are malformed, or don't have definite answers. (Sorry if the post looks weird, Slashcode doesn't show the diamond operator or several other logical symbols).

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Colonel Korn]

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.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[deathguppie]

IANAS,.. but I'll giver a go, let's break it down like a math problem shall we..

So in virtue of what is it true

Obviously truth is virtuous so that is strait forward enough..

that there could have been Aliens when in fact there are none,

And since this statement is basically true there are no Aliens..

and when, moreover, nothing that exists in fact could have been an Alien?

Aha.. and here is the sum of the problem. Nope nothing exists that could have been an Alien.

So, (the virtue of the truth) + (not having aliens) = (no existing aliens) ... ?

There see how simple that was?

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[bertok]

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 introductory classes, and just a couple of days in, we had a conversation along the lines of:

lecturer: "blah blah blah... rules... blah blah blah... rules"
lecturer: "... the exception proves the rule."
me: "No it doesn't, the exception disproves the rule."
lecturer: "Well, how about this example, there are speed limits, but the exception is emergency vehicles, which are allowed to go faster than the speed limit, which proves the rule."
me: "No, then the rule is either: 'Everybody except emergency vehicles are legally required to drive under the speed limit', OR the rule 'everybody must drive under the speed limit' is wrong. Pick one."
lecturer: "But the rule that everybody must drive under the speed limit is still valid."
me: "It's not, you just gave a counterexample."

That's when I stopped talking and realized that everybody who knew how to thing logically took their 'philosophy' and named it 'science', and everybody who was left was a blithering idiot.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[DriedClexler]

Philosphers still debate this stuff? Hasn't Judea Pearl (et al) already solved this with the method of causal nets and counterfactual surgery? (Presentation)

Thanks for nothing, philosophers!

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[strangeattraction]

Since we have imperfect knowledge about the said universe we are stuck with discussing the validity of the logic. The truethyness of the statement will forever be in doubt given that we may indeed learn something new about the universe that will make the alien existence possible. So actually it is a highly academic discussion of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Red Flayer]

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 original:

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?

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 Nature" (remember, Aliens exist only because of fundamentally different Laws of Nature)?

But as for sticking to wikipedia... good idea, I think, if you're not a student of philosophy. The SEP isn't really written for the average Joes like you and me (no disrespect if you actually are a philosophy student)... so it's not a good resource for us.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Even after that translation to logical language that we're more used to (Given..what..(implicit) such that), it still isn't any clearer of an explanation of what actualism is.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

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:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing is ever settled in philosophy because no matter what kind of theory you've got, there is always something wrong with it. Philosophy is based around fitting the world into human understanding, and the world does not fit human understanding. The product of philosophy is then for each subject a bunch of theories of that subject that are all wrong, but that in some sense are increasingly insigthful about the subject. Other ares of thought avoid this problem by telling troublemakers to shut up when they bring up problems that are deemed philosophical, e.g. "let's make some chairs", "how do we know what a chair is?", "shut up and make a chair."

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is possibly the most obtuse and pretentious restatement of Russell's paradox I've ever seen.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed the point. The point isn't about what the rule is, the point was that the existence of an exception proves that the rule existed in the first place.

To use your professors example:

Ambulances are allowed to travel above the speed limit of 55 miles per hour.

This is a single statement of an exception. This statement proves the existence of a rule that other vehicles may only travel at 55 miles per hour. It has nothing to do with proving the "rule" to be true-- how would you even prove a rule to be true? A rule my exist, or not exist, it may be followed or it may be broken, but it cannot be "true" or "false"

An more familar example is a no parking sign. I assume you've seen a sign along the lines of "No parking between 7pm and 7am"? this sign "proves" that parking is allowed between the opposite hours.

Perhaps you thought you were being clever, but honestly you just didn't understand what the professor was saying. Quite contrary to your original intention, this proves all the more our need for better classes on philosophy and the critical thinking.

The fact that people can't even follow basic philosophy is a sad example of how far our educational system as fallen.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[neltana]

Either your lecturer is using "the exception proves the rule" improperly, or you should pay more attention during those "blah blah blahs." A sign that said "Emergency vehicles may use breakdown lane" implies that non-emergency vehicles cannot...the fact that the sign writer felt the need to state the exception implies there was an underlying rule or norm that was being excepted (the sign writer would still be being needlessly obscure, of course).

For example:

cop: you can't park there!

me: Yes I can, the sign says "No Parking on Sundays"

cop: But today isn't Sunday!

me: Right, but the sign is the exception that proves the rule. "No parking on Sunday" implies parking is allowed on other days.

cop: Oh...okay, you have a tail light out. Here's a ticket.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[maxwell demon]

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?

IMHO the answer is very simple: Because, as far as we know, there is no reason why there could not have been Aliens. Indeed, "there could have been Aliens" is nothing more than a concise form of saying that such a reason doesn't exist.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

People are answering this, but it was merely intended as a translation of the sentence with which the OP had a problem.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Patch86]

I think you misunderstand that saying. Although to be fair, so does almost everyone.

The saying "exception that proves the rule" is much misunderstood. What it means is that if someone states an exception, you know there must be a rule which it must be an exception to. The original rue does not need to be stated, it can be inferred ("proven") by the exception.

So if someone states to you "emergency vehicles are allowed to travel faster than 60 MPH on a public road", they have told you an exception. By being told this exception, you can infer that the general rule is that non-emergency vehicles cannot go faster than 60 MPH.

Or to put it another way, if you read an official leaflet that says "emergency vehicles are allowed to travel faster than 60 MPH on a public road", you can be sure that it wouldn't say this if there were no speed limit for non-emergency vehicles. The existence of this exception proves the existence of a rule, even though you haven't been told the rule itself.

What the saying DOESN'T mean, as it is often misunderstood to mean, that a rule is somehow more valid by the existence of something that breaks the rule. Because that is obviously ridiculous.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Chowderbags]

Apparently, it's describing a special car design that is unlike any car that has ever been produced. This special car could have existed (had it gotten funding), but alas, it did not, and maybe it would have even required the fundamental physics of the universe to be different.

The question then is, what's the point of the car design that was never build, tested, and might not have even been possible?

/Obligatory car analogy

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[dfenstrate]

You touch on the problem, and the widespread disdain for philosophy as a field of study.

It's all been done, at least anything of any possible use or relevancy. New students of philosophy, or professors seeking to publish papers, must 'break new ground,' when there is little to be broken.

So if someone actually breaks new ground- unlikely- it will be so obscure and dense as to be unreadable, and so separated from our daily lives as to be useless.

More likely, the case is as you point out- spinning a pile of BS in order to dazzle your way into an 'A' or a MA/PHD, rehashing an old topic or just hoping you can appear smart enough that no one will point out it's crap, out of fear of being told 'Well you just don't get it.'

The horse-shit as real work scam can also be seen in 'modern art', where talentless hacks splatter paint on a canvas or piss in a jar, attach some ridiculous 'statement' to it, and tell everyone who says it's trash that 'you just don't get it.'

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[maxwell demon]

If it's a translation, it should have the same meaning as thew original sentence. So why should it matter if people answer to the original sentence or to the translation?

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[bbtom]

What's the problem? That's perfectly readable*!

* For values of 'readable' defined by graduate-level study of philosophy.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[the phantom]

Best. Car analogy. Ever.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think your translation is close, but I don't think the idea is that Aliens are precluded by the Laws of Nature. The question is simply, what makes it the case that there *could* have been Aliens given that there aren't any Aliens in fact? What is it that makes statements about what is merely possible true?

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Teancum]

I think this works a whole lot better:

In contemporary analytic philosophy, actualism is a position on the ontological status of possible worlds that holds that everything that exists (i.e., everything there is) is actual.

The denial of actualism is possibilism, the thesis that there are some entities that are merely possible: these entities exist (in the same way that ordinary objects around us do) but are not to be found in the actual world. One famous version of possibilism is David Lewis's modal realism.

I agree.... they simply need to get to the point and explain the topic. BTW, I love the lead paragraph guidelines for Wikipedia, and think they end up improving the articles involved when they are followed.

This lead paragraph from the Stanford Encyclopedia makes my head ache simply reading it too.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[drew30319]

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?

Although there might be some way of parsing this to make sense to somebody more familiar with Philosophy I'm inclined to think that it could just be a typo. The paragraphs that follow seemed much more approachable. Possibly it should read as:

"So in virtue of that, 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?"

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[bertok]

An more familar example is a no parking sign. I assume you've seen a sign along the lines of "No parking between 7pm and 7am"? this sign "proves" that parking is allowed between the opposite hours.

No, it doesn't. Parking may be restricted, for other reasons, for example, on that particular day. There may be a special event on, for example, indicated by a second street sign. You may be in a vehicle that is illegal to park on a public street at all times, such as a wide truck, or a vehicle carrying dangerous materials. That sign only proves that it is not legal to park between those times, the reverse is implied, but not proven.

This is exactly what I find wrong with philosophy - a good fraction of it simply ceases to be interesting or meaningful if the logic used is strict in the mathematical sense, not in the much weaker form still used in most philosophical discussions.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[josh82]

Poster didn't say it was a translation, just that it was intended as such.

And even if it were a translation, it may have just been a bad one. I mean, who disputes that there are both good and bad translations?

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Artifakt]

For something which might shed some light on your 'aliens' example, you might read Douglas R. Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach". He has a section where he writes on contrafactuals, and goes into some detail into how people think about things they know are not actually true. He begins this section by writing about some fictional characters such as Achilles and the Tortoise, which he uses at many places in the book, and in this case they are watching a TV sports event on a set that can show how the game might go if some rules were different. He points out that it seems to make more sense to speculate about what might have happened if the wide reciever had sweaty hands than what the play would have looked like if space was five dimensional (or something like that). It seems to be very natural for most of us to accept some things we know to be untrue provisionally, and speculate about what else would change if they were true, but to reject other speculations as too weird or too silly, or just not done. And there's a largeish middle ground where some things 'feel' reasonable in some cases but not others. Hofstadter gives some excellent examples.
        That's what philosophy is for. "Everybody" or at least 99%+ of us, will entertain some things we think are untrue, provisionally, to see where they lead. It can be overwhelmingly stupid not to. For example, just imagine making a mistake that leads to a very close call while driving, and not thinking "That was dangerous - I could have been killed!", or deciding that, since you weren't actually killed, you won't think any further about whether it was your mistake or not. Good work in philosophy can take something such as this and delve into why some such speculations seem more reasonable than others, when after all, they are all equally based at their very beginning on something we start off by knowing is untrue. Why does it not make sense to stop immediately when a counterfactual comes up in thought? What Hofstadter is doing there is epistemology - basically "how do we know the things we know?".
          The aliens problem isn't just a stupid play on words, if it gets you thinking properly about the chain of contrafactuals that lead to it. How sure are you that there aren't any actual aliens provably available to point to for this example? (Hopefully very, or you'll produce one). How sure are you of all the mechanisms that drive evolution? (Probably much less so). How big a change in the way things evolved on this world would your particular hypothetical aliens take? (And how sure are you of your answer, probably less sure than for either previous question). Are we going farther out on a speculative limb to imagine aliens that evolved from giant land dwelling bat descendants, and use sonar to hunt prey, or ones that are built like hydrogen filled gasbags and digest solar energy? Why does one sound more realistic, more like something evolution maybe could do, more 'survivable' than the other? (Does either one really sound more plausable to you?). Remember, a lie is a lie, a counterfactual is a counterfactual - why isn't that where your brain wants to stop, instead of perhaps thinking something like "Yes, but it wouldn't have taken a lot of changes for some bats to have lost flight and evolved towards being land dwellers again, but it would take big changes in the way things are for hydrogen filled flying lifeforms to survive on a world with frequent lightning, fires and sharp pointy objects."

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] 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.

There are no Aliens; is that because the particular parameters of our universe are wrong or is there no possible set of parameters which would allow Aliens to exist? What is the set of Aliens that can be generated by sweeping the set of parameters to the universe? What is the nature of that which cannot be generated? And so on and so on...

(My metaphysics course, in my last semester in college, was weeks and weeks of monologues like the original quote, but starting at 8am. I had, asymptotically, no clue what was going on. My final paper was a desperate attempt across eight pages to formulate a coherent question, and then half a page where I admitted the answer to the question was trivially "No." The professor's comment was "You raise some interesting points, but by your own admission they have no bearing on your thesis. Odd." I'm sure his grading algorithm was 'If not graduating, fail; otherwise...." I got a B.)

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, as a translation of a single sentence from a longer work, it is an incomplete argument. It matters because the sentence - translation or no - has to be considered in context.

The form of my presentation, I think, has caused people to view it as a question I put forth to be answered, rather than what I hoped (clarification).

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

While the underlying premise of "actualism" may be sound (I haven't read about it yet) this author's example sucks.

Show me where all the species of the universe are documented and we may distinguish one with the characteristics of which he is speaking; until we know this list, we cannot say with certainty that "there are no Aliens." Therefore his premise, which seeks to invoke a sort of Zen koan-like problem, is reduced to meaninglessness.

Not only that, but who is stating that "there could have been Aliens when in fact there are none" if it is not only the author himself? Which makes the whole exercise an attack at a strawman.

P.S. extremophile bacteria which survive in pH 2 or less, or temperatures above 200C might count as Aliens, but again one can no longer state that they don't exist.
Also: captcha text "pedagogy" - maybe Slashdot is hinting at me to get a PhD myself...

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Twinbee]

Nice answer. I would have also added that the supposedly intended meaning that anon gave seems so incredibly trivial (even though it's not mathematically true) that like you say, it's just a play on words. So trivial and obvious, that I can't imagine that to be the meaning at all.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

What garbage

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'in virtue of what' locution is likely the stumbling block. The idea behind this locution is the so-called Truthmaker Thesis: For every true sentence, there is something that makes it true. The idea behind the Truthmaker Thesis is this: Sentences aren't just true for no reason, but are true because things are a certain way. Why is 'snow is white' true? Because there is snow, and it's white. Why is 'there are electrons' true? Because there are electrons. (Notice the single quotes--that makes all the difference between talking about words (sentences) and talking about the world.) Typically, you can parse 'in virtue of what' as 'what makes it the case that' or, more succinctly, 'why'. Anyway, consider the sentence 'there could have been Aliens'. The author asserts that this sentence is true. Now, by analogy with the previous cases, we want to know why this sentence is true. The problem is that, unlike our examples of snow and electrons, there is apparently nothing in the world that corresponds to the truth of this sentence--there are no aliens, and there is nothing that could have been an alien. Hence, it looks like we have an exception to the Truthmaker Thesis; we have a true sentence with nothing that makes it true. Most philosophers find this intolerable, however (you mean NOTHING explains the truth of that sentence?!) and so develop fancy theories, "actualism" being one of those, to explain how sentences like 'there could have been aliens' have things that make them true.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[neltana]

The fact that there may be other elements besides the sign that influence whether or not parking is truly allowed is not the point. The point is that the sign "No parking between 7pm and 7am" is implicitly telling you that parking IS allowed between 7am and 7pm.

Is the sign giving you details about what type of parking is allowed? No, it is not. Could other signs offer more or even contradictory information about parking? Yes, certainly. Could the sign be completely and totally wrong in both the explicit and implicit information it conveys? Absolutely!

The phrase "the exception proves the rule" is not referring to mathematical proof that a rule exists and is valid. It is referring to the fact that we can deduce that the writer of the sign had an underlying rule in mind because of how they wrote the sign. We may, of course, be wrong...our understanding of the sign may be faulty, the sign writer may not have intended it as an exception. However, IF the writer did intend it as an exception, then our deduction must be correct--the writer MUST have had an underlying rule in mind.

Human communication contains gaps and unspoken assumptions--especially when it comes to norms. We don't tend to explicitly state what "everybody knows." However, this unstated information makes it very hard to have a rigorous discussion of human knowledge and behavior.

Thus, we are often left in the position where we need to explicitly state what "everybody knows." This can be quite difficult, since, sometimes, we are looking across time and outside of our cultural context--we aren't privvy to what a given speaker assumed his or her listeners shared as common knowledge. How can we find and delineate this information? Well, one useful way to identify unspoken norms is to look at stated exceptions to these norms.

Is this a useful thing to do? Well, that is like asking "Is division useful?" It depends on what question you are trying to answer and the type of analysis you are undertaking. It isn't hard to imagine someone misusing division to come up with an answer that is wrong or at least not useful. However, we know that division can also yield a useful answer. Similarly, there are problem domains where an analysis of unspoken norms, conducted carefully and properly, can yield useful results. It can also yield garbage if misapplied.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Threni]

> Philosphers still debate this stuff?

They still debate god! I'm not sure what sort of an answer they expect, nor who they expect to listen to it.

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia has shitty writing on many technical topics (philosophical or otherwise) as well

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Red Flayer]

but I don't think the idea is that Aliens are precluded by the Laws of Nature

They are by definition; this is what makes them Aliens as per the sentences preceding the sentence I "translated".

Re:The readability seems to be questionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Near as I can tell, the issue is: what makes it actually *possible* that said Aliens could have existed, as opposed to actually impossible?

Awesome site but it's not new...

[divisionbyzero]

I've been going to plato.stanford.edu for years.

Re:Awesome site but it's not new...

[Anonymous Coward]

There wasn't even the implication that is was, the first sentence of the summary is "For decades, Stanford has been working on a different kind of Wikipedia.", and there is nothing to imply the site is new in the rest of the summary.

Decades...

[KimmoS]

"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/

Re:Decades...

[fishexe]

"For decades, Stanford has been working on a different kind of Wikipedia"

Didn't you hear? 15 years now constitutes three decades. It's the 21st century, business moves at the speed of information, information moves at the speed of thought, and time-scales have been adjusted accordingly.

Re:Decades...

[KimmoS]

Dude, this is the worst Wikipedia I've seen in my life.

15 years != 3 decades, can perhaps feel like that if you are getting old but... no. You are assuming that all "whatever" progress has been kinda linear before 1995.

Business definitely does not move at the speed of information. It's way slower than that.

Information also does not move at the speed of thought.

And it's always really stupid to start adjusting time-scales just because it takes more than 15 years to get your website done...

Re:Decades...

[fishexe]

And it's always really stupid to start adjusting time-scales just because it takes more than 15 years to get your website done...

Yeah, but what other excuse have they got?

Queue the anti-intellectuals!

[Anonymous Coward]

Brace yourself, here come the "academics" hate! If there is one thing that is consistent on slashdot, it is the "joe slashdot user knows more about any subject than tenured professors" meme. Say it with me "correlation does not equal causation, thus your study is flawed!"

Wikipedia if Run By Academic Experts..

[kevinNCSU]

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.

Re:Wikipedia if Run By Academic Experts..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to see Wikipedia if it were actually ran by a wolfpack.

Er... I think that's what we've already got.

Silly article spin

[mattdm]

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.

double negative

[M. Kristopeit]

wikipedia is the alternative to authoritarian sources... the alternative to the alternative is not something to brag about.

stanford seems ignorant of the current state of information discourse. harvard doesn't test their students any more... the ivy is rotting.

Why would you want to not let people change it?

[Mathonwy]

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 you wrote that need correcting. (And assuming that you have at least some degree of trust that they will do so in good faith and not just delete/vandalize your work I guess.)

The only reasons I can think that you would want to write something in a way that DOESN'T allow people to modify it is if you either a) are 100% certain that what you have written is completely accurate and definitive and will require no maintenance, b) are more worried about having "your" version up and public than having the "most correct" version up, or c) don't trust the people who might do edits, or the moderation system.

All of these seem like pretty petty reasons except C though. (a reeks of hubris, and b seems like the wrong goal.) And wikipedia HAS a pretty good handle on C, all things considered. It seems like the biggest danger of this is that the update process becomes too much work (either because you have to wait for 120 people to review it, or because those 120 people get bogged down by review oversight requests) and that the encyclopedia becomes out of date.

It will be interesting to see how this works out for them though. If they find a model that works, then more power to them?

Re:Why would you want to not let people change it?

[frank_adrian314159]

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.

Re:Why would you want to not let people change it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point is the "authority" aspect. Somehow the present age has rejected "truth by authority" and embraced "truth by consensus".

It's a good thing we all know the world is flat. If someone tries to change wikipedia to show it as a sphere the intelligence of the general community can swiftly strike them down...

Re:Why would you want to not let people change it?

[jjohnson]

assuming that you have at least some degree of trust that they will do so in good faith and not just delete/vandalize your work I guess.

This is exactly where Wikipedia falls down.

And wikipedia HAS a pretty good handle on C, all things considered.

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 they are), you get either edit wars or the idiosyncratic views of page-squatters. There's also no mechanism for verifying the expertise of writers--that's how you get scandals like the Wikipedia editor who claimed to have multiple PhDs and was page-squatting and reverting others edits, who turned out to be a 26 year old college student.

Re:Why would you want to not let people change it?

[Mathonwy]

Actually, I see it less as "rejection of truth by authority" and more "acceptance of the existence of more than one authority". I'm fine with accepting an authority if that one authority is infallible and willing to keep any pages under their care updated constantly. If not though, I'd appreciate being able to have someone say "actually, section 6.23 is no longer wholly accurate..." and make appropriate corrections.

I'll concede though that wikipedia may not have as good a handle on edit wars as I was thinking when I wrote up the post. I confess I was thinking more about factual articles about relatively non-controversial things. (The chemical properties of Strontium, or biographical details of HP Lovecraft or whatever.) For controversial things, I'll admit, it can be a little spottier.

Re:Why would you want to not let people change it?

[Artifakt]

Wikipedia has a lousy handle on C.

I'll agree provisionally - the provision being that this affects some subjects much more than others. I trust most real idiots not to care enough to bother about editing a wiki entry on Malament-Hogarth spacetime or Reissner-Nordstrom metrics. (Maybe I shouldn't mention those as it will encourage some real idiot to mess with them). Still, what about wanting to avoid (A) acting 100% certain when you aren't, or to avoid (B) caring more about ego boost than taking a chance on getting more overall truth by sharing the process? Both of those, especially together, might make it worth putting up with your high negative index for (C) even if you are right about it.

Citizendium

[evilviper]

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 if they're all experts on the subject.

Similarly, articles are reviewed by experts (required to have a degree) and those reviewed version are the ones which stick, while you have to go out of your way to see the revised versions.

For the details, and an indictment of all that is wrong with Wikipeida, see: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium%3F

If nothing else, CZ is the only other wiki with a Wikipedia founder behind it. "Suffice it to say that he learns from his mistakes."

Re:Citizendium

[David Gerard]

Except it's dead, Jim. It failed and died. And the people that are left are pseudoscientists who convinced Dr Sanger they have credentials.

I would submit that judging by the results, CZ is not a good model to follow.

Re:Citizendium

[evilviper]

That is the most overtly slanted article I've ever seen. Since when does one random person's comment on a blog consititute a useful citation about (eg.) all of academia? It's nothing more than an attack piece, plain and simple.

The statistics are vastly more useful, and speak for themselves:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Statistics

CZ continues to grow. Contributions continue, and it's most certainly not all (or even mostly) homeopathy, or any other nonsense you can name.

CZ is certainly far lower volume than WP, but those kinds of comparisons completely and totally fail to account for quality, where there is practically no vandalism of CZ, and an overwhelming majority of edits to WP are related to exactly that.

Even if it does eventually fail, that won't prove whether the model is a good one or not, anyhow.

Re:Citizendium

[David Gerard]

The numbers are from Citizendium. The statistics are that it's dead, Jim - participation is at an all-time low. But maybe the charter will make everything good again. Maybe.

Re:Citizendium

[evilviper]

The statistics are that it's dead, Jim - participation is at an all-time low.

Thanks, because I didn't already say:

CZ is certainly far lower volume than WP, but those kinds of comparisons completely and totally fail to account for quality, where there is practically no vandalism of CZ, and an overwhelming majority of edits to WP are related to exactly that.

I'll take a highly accurate, well-written but low-volume Wiki over the alternative any day.

You're right it is like a journal.

[strangeattraction]

Instead of making out like this is something "NEW" let us just call it what it is. A "Journal". All be it one that doesn't cover a great many interesting things and takes extremely long to get things published. But as long as you are publishing things that will not go out of date then you are ok. What I find interesting is this trumped up need to say open wikipedia bad -- peer reviewed journal good or vise versa. The fact is we need both. Get over it academia.

120 only ?! Too few reviewers!

[G3ckoG33k]

120 only ?! That is far too few reviewers!

That is less than one per academic topic.

No wonder that Wikipedia will remain relevant.

Philosphers?

[Dancindan84]

I'm not sure that an article on quantum computing is best peer reviewed by 120 philosophers...

Re:Philosphers?

[arogier]

It might work when a number of the philosophers are logicians.

Re:Philosphers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you do understand that there are many areas of philosophy that intersect computing? Or are you so naive that you believe that all disciplines have strong enforced boundaries?

Re:Philosphers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if they are dining ...

Re:Philosphers?

[Tacvek]

But have it reviewed by 120 academics in CS, and you would likely have more subject matter experts reviewing the article. I can't imagine that very many of the 120 philosophers are experts in quantum computing. Indeed many of them probably have almost no knowledge or interest in computational theory, while all computer scientists have (or should have) at least a passing interest in computational theory.

Nothing new?

[necro351]

Slashdot posts many stories related to Wikipedia, and in each of those stories related to its trustworthiness, it is endlessly repeated that you should follow the footnotes to where the source is cited, and do two things: (1) fact check the statement you are about to cite, and (2) fix it if its wrong. Using this simple strategy, you never have to invite the wrath of your teachers because you would never cite Wikipedia (but instead cite what it cites), and additionally you'd be doing mankind a service by keeping Wikipedia accurate. Yes there are vandals out there, but the operating principle of Wikipedia is that people interested in sharing truthful information far outweigh those that seek to vandalize and misrepresent it. If that is true then Wikipedia will continue to be right far more often that its not. This is a good thing, because at the rate the population is exploding, Wikipedia seems to be the only strategy of cataloging our cultural story that will scale. I don't see how 120 philosophers who probably have grants to write and classes to teach will find the time to do it.

It's been tried: Nupedia. Citizendium.

[dpbsmith]

I wish them luck, but it is certainly not the first time it's been tried. In fact, Wikipedia originated as Nupedia, "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, 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:It's been tried: Nupedia. Citizendium.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, whatever. SEP is pretty old news now, having been started in 1995. There's 1200 entries, it's a pretty highly regarded reference work for philosophy, and a lot of scholars have contributed. If I need a reference for things in philosophy, I go to SEP and not Wikipedia.

Re:It's been tried: Nupedia. Citizendium.

[fishexe]

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.

Re:It's been tried: Nupedia. Citizendium.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sanger has had two other failed Wikipedia clones too. He keeps cranking them out as long as there are investors stupid enough to keep giving him cash.

Ethics

[AnonymousClown]

The Golden Rule is the Gold standard of Ethics (Confucius was the first to say it, btw. ). It's short and concise - everything else is just mental masturbation.

Gee, is it ethical to [...]?

Hmm, would I want that to happen to me? No? It's unethical.

Re:Ethics

[maxwell demon]

The Golden Rule is the Gold standard of Ethics

The Golden Rule? You mean, "Who has the gold, makes the rules?" :-)

Re:Ethics

[melikamp]

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.

Re:Ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

The golden rule gets a bit fuzzy cross species since we're not cognitively equipped to step into the shoes of other animals. Should I kill and eat an animal because evolution adapted me to get energy in such a way? Should lions eat their prey? Ethics is about minimizing pain for all (and much less important, maximizing happiness for all). Without those two things, ethics is meaningless (a rock doesn't care about stuff, and probably a tree doesn't either, because they lack a brain and ability to experience pain/happiness. We don't even know those for sure because no human has experienced the universe embodied as a rock).

Re:Ethics

[Teancum]

A corollary to the "golden rule" is this:

Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.

That gets rid of the problems you mentioned here with molestation and assault, but it also introduces other problems such as trying to determine what exactly it is that the other person wants you do really be doing, or if you really want to do what they want you to do to them.

Of course this is a good way to start a philosophical argument too.

Re:Ethics

[steelfood]

You're actually committing a logical fallacy here. The statement actually boils down to the concept:

If not like -> not do.

What you're saying is:

If like -> do.

Most objections to the Golden Rule tend to be logically fallacious. It's understandable though. Even Wikipedia lists among the "variations" of the Golden Rule logically inconsistent statements. The majority of the objections tend to attack those "variations," which are subject to attacks because they are logically inconsistent.

The corruption of the Golden Rule is sometimes done in ignorance or error, but there is occasionally an intent to distort it for an ulterior, typically more sinister purpose. For example, another common extrapolation from the Golden Rule is the idea of "an eye for an eye."

There are a few objections that are more widely received as valid, particularly at the fringe cases. For example, the idea of killing the aggressor in self-defense is often brought up as an exception to the rule. As people are rarely suicidal, they probably wouldn't want to be killed, even in self defense (perceived or actual has no bearing here) by the other party. Hence by the Golden Rule, killing even if in self defense remains immoral.

Re:Ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ethics

[Artifakt]

The difference in the way most straight men and most straight women would feel about some reasonably attractive person of the opposite sex indicating a sexual interest on short acquaintance should be enough to demonstrate this without bringing up S&M edge cases.

Re:Ethics

[Artifakt]

We have Paul Simon's and Art Garfunkle's account, (although I could never remember which one was the rock and which one was the island). By that, "... a rock feels no pain ...".

Re:Ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

the golden rule can be gamed, like most statements, if you take them at a level of literalness not intended. a better phrasing for the golden rule would be:

grant other people's desire for respectful consideration from you, as you would want respectful consideration from them. Furthermore, If you want particular actions taken on your behalf, be aware you are more likely to get them if you are prepared to take particular actions at the request of others. Specific details of what you or the other person want are irrelevant to this statement. What matters is that you are willing to honor others needs, being aware that this is more likely to give you what you need from others.

Re:Ethics

[yyxx]

That's not a "corollary" (meaning, something that easily follows from the Golde Rule), it's a different rule, called the Platinum Rule.

Re:Ethics

[drinkypoo]

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.

Applying the golden rule properly requires intelligence which is why it is not a good one. But Jesus' version is superior to the Rabbinical in that it is proactive. The problem is that what he was trying to say is to treat people with tolerance, respect, and love, and he should have just said that.

Re:Ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

This won't work either. The murderer might say "don't fight back." But thanks for playing.

Re:Ethics

[Teancum]

However this "rule" puts the onus of action upon the person performing the action... where they can opt not to do something that may be harmful to themselves.

Isaac Asimov's rules of robotics IMHO do an even better job of coming up with a basic moral philosophy that avoids many of the problems which are alluded to here in terms of causing or inflicting harm upon somebody else. Those rules of robotics don't address issues related to unquestioned subservience, and have many other problems.

Keep in mind that the "Golden Rule" was also put into a context that the Decalogue would be widely acknowledges and generally followed by most people with only aberrant exceptions that were largely discouraged anyway. Pulling that concept out of that environment, as it being done here, does not properly address how this "rule" was to be followed in the first place.

Re:Ethics

[drinkypoo]

Surprisingly, the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent god was incapable of saying what he meant when he came down and spoke as Jesus!

Well, if anyone knows what the original text said, and how the author knows precisely what Jeshua meant when he said it, then perhaps we can finally settle this argument. I'm not wholly convinced the guy ever existed, but I'm not convinced he didn't either.

Re:Ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have this affliction? I'm sorry, but I'd gladly punch you in the stomach to make you feel better.

ZOMBIES!

[idcard_1]

Still waiting for the page to load...(thanks /.) But how can you beat an article about zombies from an "authoritative" source!? http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

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Really newsworthy?

[totally_mad]

There have been several other attempts in to setup similar wikis. For example, Scholarpedia is exactly this model of a peer-reviewed topical encyclopaedia, but for mathematical sciences. There were two comments from other Slashdotters, complaining that a group of academics, or any group of people will often struggle to reach consensus. But I think that there are qualitatively different types of disagreements. Some are about writing or presentation style ("where the place the word 'the'"). But, some are more substantive, especially in topics that are not entirely resolved. For example, there is little disagreement that Newton's laws are wrong, but nearly exact for certain spatial and time scales. But, if you were to write an article on information coding in neurons, there are probably as many opinions as there are labs working in that area!

If only Wikipedia became more widely used than it is presently, especially in academic circles, then more groups will be interested in having articles reflect debates. To reflect different opinions is particularly important in fields involving subjectivity (pretty much every thing other than Mathematics). If there is enough interest among academics in Wikipedia, then the current state of debates on various topics is bound to be reflected in the articles.

Given that Stanford's plato website is simply a fledgling effort, I do not see why it is newsworthy. If for example, someone cited an article from the plato website in a peer-reviewed journal article (and reviewers accepted it), that would be newsworthy. Short of that, it is simply yet another effort at collaborative information sharing. It cannot be newsworthy simply because it is from a well known university.

Okay you asked for the philosophical argument

[hellfire]

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

[cinnamon colbert]

I saw the stanford website several years ago, and thought it poorly written and incomprehensible to the non specialist at the time; revisiting the goedel link in the article does nothing to dispell that impression.
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 (b) the wiki copyright policy allows some else to steal my stuff *for profit*
I think the future does belong to closed, editor driven wikis, and we will see a lot more of them in the future - maybe the professors who torture their college students with super $$ textbooks can get together and write textbook wikis; you got 1,000 college profs who teach, say organic chem, surely 150 of 'em can write well, and surely 30 of those could contribute; you got 30 people to share the load, and a couple of interns from CompSci to setup the software and hardware, you could turn out a 1st rate organic chem text, and save college students millions, and stickit to the loathsome textbook publishers all at once.

Re:authoritative, but incomprehensible

[jellyfrog]

allows some else to steal my stuff

What? It's just a wikipedia article. It really matters that much to you? And how does one "steal" stuff from a public web site anyway? Look, the point of wikipeda isn't to get your own awesome article published so people can see what a good writer you are (even if it is awesome). The point is to enable people to educate themselves, to disseminate knowledge. If people take what you've written and use it somewhere else then good, mission accomplished. I think that's really the most useful way to feel about this. Even if people do take what you've written, pass it off as their own, and sell it in books, that's not actually preventing our goal (people being able to read it) from being reached, so I wouldn't worry about it.

As for the issue of doofuses putting false stuff in articles.. well, that's a problem and I have no answer to that. I just want to talk about the issue of "ownership".

Re:authoritative, but incomprehensible

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent a lot of time and effort on some of the articles, like contributing stuff on historical methods to the dna sequencing article (eg, the stuff about W Fiers and viral RNA sequencing)
  I did this for free, on my own time, to help other people. why should someone make a profit from this? that really bothers me; thats my opinion. maybe i'm a tiny minority, but i do call that stealing.

Re:authoritative, but incomprehensible

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw the stanford website several years ago, and thought it poorly written and incomprehensible to the non specialist at the time; revisiting the goedel link in the article does nothing to dispell that impression.

I hate it when people launch little turds like this without a smidgen of argument. You are confusing "poorly written" with "incomprehensible to the non-specialist" — or actually, "incomprehensible to me". I would agree that the technical content of the entry (which in fact constitutes most of the entry) would be largely incomprehensible to someone who lacked any background in mathematical logic — but it is an article about Gödel's work in mathematical logic! The article is *not* poorly written and is for that matter also not incomprehensible to the non-specialist. It requires only a solid foundation in mathematical logic — perhaps 2-3 semesters of study at the undergraduate level.

They don't get it.

[blair1q]

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 facts. Peer review a whole new article, then peer review the edits to that article as they are made.

I guess we'll have to wait for the next iteration of Wikipedia-killer for someone to get it right, because Stanford didn't.

Wikipedia As a Source

[RAMMS EIN]

``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 is always going to refer to that specific version of the article. That way, you won't end up linking to a page that doesn't contain the text that you used in your research.

It's also why Wikipedia policy requires proper citing and disallows original research. When strictly followed, this policy ensures that everything on Wikipedia is backed up by a source somewhere else. Of course, this policy isn't always strictly followed, but, in cases where it isn't, you can always decide the Wikipedia article isn't trustworthy - the same consideration you would have to make for any other source.

I've found that Wikipedia is actually a very reliable source. This surprised me, because I never expected the "everyone can write whatever they want" model would actually produce the quality that Wikipedia has. In hindsight, I think I should have known better. After all, the entire web is built on the "everyone can write whatever they want principle", and, when you get down to it, so are books, newspapers, and pamphlets. And there sure are a lot of questionable pamphlets, newspaper articles, and books out there. Wikipedia at least has policies in place that promote quality, and technical measures that preserve history, make discussions public, and make it easy to restore previous good versions if anyone vandalizes an article.

Re:Wikipedia As a Source

[fishexe]

This is why, when using Wikipedia as a source, you should link to the Wikipedia article at a certain point in time.

Actually, if you're using it for a source in something academic, you shouldn't list it at all. But you can trace the sources Wikipedia uses, check them individually for veracity, and use them as sources instead.

I've found that Wikipedia is actually a very reliable source. This surprised me, because I never expected the "everyone can write whatever they want" model would actually produce the quality that Wikipedia has.

To be completely accurate, it's really the "everyone can write whatever they want until some smart/expert folks realize they're writing bullshit and then the page gets locked" model. Remember what happened when Stephen Colbert tried to use wikipedia to show the elephant population was increasing? That sort of lockout happens fairly often and IMHO is an important reason wikipedia's accuracy doesn't go all to shit.

In hindsight, I think I should have known better. After all, the entire web is built on the "everyone can write whatever they want principle", and, when you get down to it, so are books, newspapers, and pamphlets.

Yeah, but you can't write whatever you want on my personal web site, unless I make it into a public wiki. And you certainly can't write whatever you want on my workplace's website. Only I get to do that. You can make a competing one, but that's actually very different from what wikipedia does: you don't need to make a competing wikipedia, you can just edit the one that exists and what you write will get the server space, promotion and audience of the rest of wikipedia. It's a very different model.

Re:Wikipedia As a Source

[radtea]

I've found that Wikipedia is actually a very reliable source.

Case in point: I compared the Wikipedia article with the Stanford article on the "Identity of Indiscernibles", a standard falsehood that is taught by philsophers everywhere as an almost axiomatic truth.

While the Standford article is still terrible, it is marginally better than the Wikipedia article. However, when I get a spare minute I will update the Wikipedia article to refer to the reference in the Stanford article that gets things at least vaguely correct, although it uses the bizarre and counter-intuitive formulation that the indiscernibles are not identical "in quantum mechanics", as if quantum mechanics did not describe reality. It also completely misses the deep and compelling proof that indiscernibles are not necessarily identical, which is the statistics of counting of identical particles. In any case, the Stanford article has pointed me toward a reasource to make the Wikipedia article better, and it is inevitable that Wikipedia will continue to improve in this way.

S.E.P

[Anonymous Coward]

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Somebody Else's Problem
S.E.P.

hi

[Anonymous Coward]

Lately I've wondered if Anonymous have been overrunning wikipedia with mathematical equations for lulz. Seeing 8 nested square roots and cryptic math symbols on an entry for 'beans' isn't so good for laymen.

Sokal affair

[D H NG]

"Vetted by experts" in the social sciences means nothing. Anyone heard of the Sokal affair?

Re:Sokal affair

[fishexe]

"Vetted by experts" in the social sciences means nothing. Anyone heard of the Sokal affair?

Fortunately, philosophy is not one of the social sciences, but one of the humanities. Oh, wait...

Re:Sokal affair

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone heard of the Sokal affair?

I think they might have.

Re:Sokal affair

[geckoFeet]

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.

Re:Sokal affair

[MindlessAutomata]

Social text wasn't really a social science journal, it was a post-structuralist mumbo jumbo journal.

Re:Sokal affair

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Umm, Sokal went public almost as soon as his article was in print. There are no citations before that point because there wasn't time for anyone else to get an article published.

Re:Sokal affair

[Anonymous Coward]

All that post-structuralist stuff *is* crap, of course.

Then again, if you read about structuralist ideas as a comparison, you will soon discover them to be crap as well. It took me a single internet search and few seconds of reading.

Re:Sokal affair

[Anonymous Coward]

All that post-structuralist stuff *is* crap, of course. But Sokal didn't do anything to demonstrate that.

Well, he demonstrated that the fact that it's published in a peer-reviewed journal doesn't mean that it isn't crap. If that makes sense.

Re:Sokal affair

[Anonymous Coward]

(1) Philosophy is not a social science.
(2) Sokal's "paper" would never have been accepted by a professional philosophy journal.
(3) Have a look at any article on the Stanford Encyclopedia. Observe that it is has nothing in common with the postmodernist drivel one might find in "Social Text" (the journal in which Sokal's paper was published, I believe).

Re:Sokal affair

[Raenex]

Yeah, they shouldn't have printed the article since they had no way of vetting it.

As mentioned in the Wikipedia article, they could have had it reviewed by other physicists. They didn't have a peer review process.

Re:Sokal affair

[geekoid]

You're being stupid. Stop being stupid.

An event in 1 journal does not mean the vetted by experts means nothing. In that case, it just means the magazine lied abut it.

The peer review process isn't perfect and mistakes get made; however look at it's overall track record and it's really, really good. Without it are civilization would still be stuck in 1800.

Re:Sokal affair

[geekoid]

And it shouldn't even be their. Philosophy now is just riding on the coat tales of it's great history.

Everything that philosophy has ever done to actually help mankind is now in it's own branch of study.
Philosophy as a field should be ended.

For the record, I studied philosophy in college. or as I came to call it "Philosphooey" hey, I was young.

Great new for philosophy students!

[Beerdood]

This really opens things up for anyone majoring in philosophy! Now when these students graduate, they have a possibility of finding work as :

1) Philosophy professor
2) Editor on stanford.edu

So in other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words...they have a setup that runs counter to everything that has made Wikipedia a success. And I haven't heard of it until now...?

review?

[TheBean]

From the article on quantum computing:

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:review?

[geekoid]

I used it several time in my thesis on bacon.

Actually, there is nothing wrong with the use of crispy. like having crispy weather.

Authoritative sources

[sjbe]

My experience in academia taught me that there was no such thing as the "authoritative" source.

Strictly speaking you are correct in general. However there are real world cases where a small group of leading experts are effectively an authoritative source until sufficient research can be done to affirm or contradict their findings. This is usually the case where not enough data is available. The fellow who knows the most is considered an authoritative source. This doesn't mean that person is necessarily right, just that they are held to be temporarily authoritative in the sense of a best available working hypothesis.

For example certain medical diagnosis (like melanoma) are still poorly understood and others are extremely rare with only a few cases ever seen. The closest thing to an authoritative source is the most experienced person with the most information on that particular disease process. There is no single definitive test that proves or disproves melanoma in many cases. The diagnosis is made by assembling information and little details. The more cases one has seen, the more "definitive" the diagnosis. My wife once diagnosed a sarcoma that has only been seen about 20 times ever. She is effectively as close to an authoritative source on the subject of this particular sarcoma as there is.

If one scholar thought one thing about a particular subject, there was always at least one other scholar who disagreed with him/her.

That's not evidence against the existence of an authoritative source. At best it's evidence that authoritative sources are rare which is exactly what we would expect. That is simply evidence that a smart (and not so smart) people can disagree, especially in cases where mathematical proofs are impossible. Just because two people are "scholars" (a vague term if there ever was one) doesn't mean they are both correct, both equally smart, both equally informed, or both equally right. In every field there are some crackpots that disagree with the consensus and there are occasionally those who prove that the consensus is wrong and overturn it. Disagreement and discussion is the root of academic progress. Science can't happen if people aren't constantly trying to disprove existing models.

No original research

[GWBasic]

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."

Wikipedia doesn't allow original research; it seems that something that takes six months to write would belong in a personal journal and then cited on Wikipedia.

Typo lulz in summary

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

"you have get submissions " hah hah can I has grammar check?

No cross-links, not a living document

[obiter]

It was interesting to read the 'quantum physics article', but it had no cross-linking and was very much one person's view. This will matter much more for contentious articles (e.g. 'Keynesian Economics', or 'Islam'). These documents are not 'living documents' and its hard to see how they can be, without crowd sourcing.

Re:No cross-links, not a living document

[obiter]

I meant to add that being a living document is particularly important in a rapidly changing field such as the 'quantum computing'.

Philosophers

[withears]

So somebody finally figured out what to do with a philosophy degree?

Re: "official"

[Anonymous Coward]

...unless of course you're talking financial statements. In that case, 'official' means 'audited', usually by a reputable accounting firm and at least by an accountant.

Use Wikipedia but don't ever cite it

[Art3x]

How to use Wikipedia:

1. Read its article on a subject to give you a jump start.

2. For fact-checking, further study, and making citations, go to the References section at the bottom of the article.

Wikipedia has a policy of No Original Research. That means everything you find in Wikipedia you should be able to find also in an authoritative reference. The policy is not strictly enforced, and you've probably seen those "citation needed" links pimpling some Wikipedia articles. But Wikipedia can be very useful for getting a jump start on the subject.

MOD PARENT UP

[dpbsmith]

1) Oops.

2) Mod parent up.

Meh. Academic isn't necessarily better.

[jbeach]

It's quite right of them to try this, of course. But I disagree with some of these implications. Individual academic experts may be less likely to be wrong about specific facts - but may also miss relevant facts due to the increasing amount of specialization in all fields of knowledge.

Whereas, ideally, crowds picking over and adding to articles means all the verifiable information from many different sources stay, and all the bad information goes.

I think this restriction of information to academics only also shows a deeper distrust and actual elitism in general. They have their reasons, and no doubt many of them are justified. But a fearfulness of opening the editing to the public implies that they don't trust the public to recognize facts and evidence - an opinion which, on the whole, I disagree with.

If things were otherwise, Nature's study of Wikipedia would have shown it to be far less accurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica - or even more accurate, depending on how you compare the articles.

http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html

Re:Meh. Academic isn't necessarily better.

[geekoid]

Dont forget, publishing is the first step in peer review, not the last.

Opening up the editing process to the general public is bad. Very bad. The general public has a lot of beliefs they can't separate from, and they don't have the training to recognize when this happens and maintain any type of decorum.

If someone who is not a recognized expert in the field finds something wrong, they still have avenues to get their voice heard.

Wikipedia is more accurate ONLY in areas of hard non controversial science facts and mathematics; however you make a false comparison. The EB is NOT a peer reviewed journal so the comparison is irrelevant.

Just to be clear, love wikipedia. It's awesome. And it's fairly accurate. It's also not a true peer review method in the scientific sense.
It would be like letting the author of a paper determine which critics he gets to apply to his paper. That would be bad.

An extension, not an alternative.

[mykro76]

The beauty of Wikipedia is that it recognises and links to more authoritative sources. I now expect that the IMDB will be the first external link in every article about a movie or actor. As the Stanford articles grow in status, so too will they be assimilated.

it's great if someone reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

it's bad the if someone only copies

as a non-dead-computer = human
we should always think and improve

writing wikis is good
but if just only reading wikis is bad

Woolloomooloo?

[AliasMarlowe]

And there's nary a mention of the several philosophers (all named Bruce) at the University of Woolloomooloo...

Re:Woolloomooloo?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Bruces were actually at the University of Wollongong, which exists now, but not, I believe, when the skit was written. Then again perhaps I was too drunk to notice?

Woolloomooloo is the subject of the children's rhyme:
How many Os in Woolloomooloo?
Two for the W
Four for the Ls
Two for the M
And that's plenty of them!

That's not a wiki, it's a peer reviewed blog.

[Seth Kriticos]

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.

By my definition, if you are publishing articles in a non editable fashion, you have a blog (peer reviewed one in this case). The core definition of a wiki is that it is collaboratively editable.

In other words, this is the same thing academics did since forever. Not that it's bad, it just has nothing at all to do with a wiki. The article header is misleading.

Bogdanov affair

[yyxx]

Nor in physics

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It's clearly a hoax

[Hognoxious]

It's clearly a hoax. There's no way they could get a group of 120 philosophers to agree about anything.

I'm sorry

[geekoid]

But I've know too many philosophers.