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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.'"
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?
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
Let me guess: 9-11 truther? ;-)
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
Let's copy these articles into Wikipedia, so they're actually of use to someone.
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.
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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.
I've been going to plato.stanford.edu for years.
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.
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.
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Vetted by experts" in the social sciences means nothing. Anyone heard of the Sokal affair?
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