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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.'"
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."); }
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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