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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.'"
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.
Your comment reminds me of a demotivational poster: "none of us is as dumb as all of us".
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
over where the place the word 'the'
Well let's hope someone besides you made the final decision on that one
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
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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