-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 19/09/2010 19:47, Peter Damian wrote: I think the wikipedia project is about an universal access to knowledge, not an elitist one. Experts are respected because they have studied deeply, but they *must* be able to transmit this knowledge to have a place in wikipedia, in my opinion. This transmission is about plain and clear explanations of the arguments, of the proofs and of the clusters of hints leading to an interpretation or a conclusion. It's about extracting from dozens of years of experience the main reasoning and sources to be considered. It's about being critical and analytical towards one's own knowledge. I believe there is no knowledge without understanding and being able to check the sources, and thus there is no universality of knowledge if one needs to pertain to a certain clique to understand something, or if one needs as much experience in the domain as an expert. Any article written by an expert should be understandable to a motivated but first-time reader profane. And I mean understanding in the strong meaning of the word, which knowing why the article is declaring this or that given the references and the arguments. As for the "expert training" that Peter Damian mention several times, I think it is not convincing per se because a training can as well teach to think critically (i.e., questioning permanently what you know and why you believe it) as to think according to a set of doctrines. So instead of believing experts (or anybody) "because they say so", everyone should document, reference, argument and construct the knowledge put into articles. Finally, what distinguishes the obscurantism from science is the demand to be open to criticism: any idea is just a proposal (an hypothesis) and its believers must accept discussing it on a epistemological level. In consequence, the top-down approach cannot be acceptable on wikipedia, at least not as a winning argument. Not out of disrespect, but because universal knowledge cannot follow an initiatic model (i.e., you only understand if you think as dictated by a hierarchy). These considerations are not limited to the interactions between experts and profanes. Long time editors who feel at home with their pet articles tend to be closed-minded towards newbies and new approaches, in my observations. Having said that, I think there is a problem with the quality of some articles, even some about hard science, which I interpret, amidst other causes, as due to a lack of rigor with citing primary sources. Without them, the controversies have no tangible common grounds - which is an unsolvable problem -. I think a huge effort should be put in motion to clarify, inspect and distinguish the quality, authenticity and primarity of the sources. Any new science starts by compiling lists and nomenclatures of its items, which are pieces of knowledge represented by articles in the case of an encyclopaedia. Then it refines its epistemology to build further. Too much undiscriminated information (about a same topic) is just noise. And how to discriminate intelligently other by checking the link of the premises to reality (their veracity and primarity) and the validity of the reasonings?

On 27 September 2010 15:17, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: This appears to be the objections of someone who thinks an encyclopedia is a journal in the field, or should work like one. As WJohnson has pointed out, Wikipedia is not a venue for academic self-promotion either. You can hardly move on Wikipedia without tripping over experts in whatever topic you're editing. Why are there any experts on Wikipedia? - d.

----- Original Message ----- From: "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 12:38 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005? This is very telling. Someone is trying to select Philosophy articles for the Wikipedia 0.8 release. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Philosophy#Philosop… They have left a message on the Philosophy project page which seems to have elicited no response. Now look at the list of articles selected. http://toolserver.org/~enwp10/bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&namespace=0&pa… Of the 22 'top importance' articles, 9 are start class, with tags like 'multiple issues', 'clean up', 'attention from expert required' and so on. 9 are C class, many also (e.g. metaphysics) have tags all over the place. 3 are B class (including one I wrote). Only one (philosophy of mind) is FA class, and that was written by a very good editor who has since given up. Of the high importance, many of these have been wrongly categorised (in some cases, incredibly so).

----- Original Message ----- From: "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 9:43 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005? So here am I looking for systematic reasons why philosophy, and humanities in general are under-represented in Wikipedia and you are saying that it is because philosophers - and by implication specialists in humanities - don't bother? Interesting. I once got puzzled why certain plants wouldn't grow in my garden. I got frustrated and thought perhaps the plants weren't bothering. Then I found that because my garden is north facing and has acid soil, the plants that like sunlight and don't like acid soil, weren't flourishing. Anyway David, I said earlier that there are several stages to the process. The first is to see whether Wikipedia does have a problem with the humanities in general. There needs to be a scientific methodology to assess what counts as 'under represented', there needs to be a survey to determine whether certain subjects are under-represented, and perhaps a paper in an appropriate journal. That's step 1. Step 2 - if the answer to step 1 is that there is a problem - is to determine whether there are underlying reasons (similar to sunshine, acidity of soil) that certain subjects are under-represented. It could be the reason is chance (this seems to be what you are saying, that in certain subjects experts bother, in others they do). If it is not chance, what are the reasons. Step 3 - is there anything the WMF can do - either directly or by persuading the community - to address the problem. Peter

----- Original Message ----- From: "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2010 9:40 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005? On the assumption that there is negative answer to Step 1 - namely, there is a serious problem with the content and quality of philosophy articles in Wikipedia (I think you agree that is not in doubt), then the answer is clearly that none of these approaches have worked so far for philosophy, either singly or collectively. Does that answer your question? The answer seemed so obvious that I didn't give it. I suppose you will reply that it is in some way the fault of the philosophers. This, as I poetically suggested, would be like blaming the plants that didn't like acid soil, for not growing in my garden. I repeat: it is unfair to blame the plants. Find out the problem with the garden or its environment or its soil or whatever, and try to fix that if possible. I found the article here quite helpful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walled_garden Wtih every kind wish, Peter

----- Original Message ----- From: "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2010 10:34 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005? The question of which ones of the list philosophers will 'balk at' is quite different from the question of 'what would work' i.e. what would improve the content. Answer: none of them. They are all eminently sensible and desirable. On citation I can remember getting this drummed into me as part of my elementary philosophical training some years ago. Now: why haven't they worked? Peter

David, I think one of the reasons that biologists and others may be happier than philosophers to edit Wikipedia is that everyone assumes they know something about the latter and don't need to study for it, whereas editors are at least a little hesitant about wading into a subject that clearly requires a specialist vocabulary. Looking at an area I edit in, animal rights, I'm aware of only two editors in that area since 2004 who have studied ethics at postgraduate level. You don't need an academic background to edit all those articles, but it helps for the articles where the philosophical arguments have to be explained. One of the editors with a background in ethics was a professional philosopher who specialized in animal rights, and who stopped editing after deciding that "raving loonies" were in charge, as he put it. And the other is me. Expertise in that area is not recognized, because everyone who has ever read a newspaper thinks they understand it. So it is very frustrating, and if it's an area you specialize in professionally, editing those articles feels like a complete waste of time. Academics don't have the time or patience to explain basic points for years on end to people who feel that reading books or papers about the subject is unnecessary. I'm sure the biology experts would give up too if their area of expertise were undermined in such a basic way. This is just one of the reasons I think it will always be harder to recruit and keep philosophers. Sarah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SlimVirgin

Sarah, this goes back to our discussion at en:WP:V a couple of weeks ago -- when it comes to humanities, en:WP doesn't emphasise the need for scholarly sources enough, and instead produces something that is more like a press mirror. This starts a vicious circle. In de:WP, the [[WP:BLG]] policy (the German equivalent of [[WP:V]]), http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLG states the following: As a matter of basic principle, scientific sources should be preferred, especially standard works and review articles that are relevant to the subject area in question. It adds that where scientific sources are not available, or not available in sufficient quantities, other secondary sources that can be considered as having been well researched may be used as well. It adds that where scientific sources and lay sources disagree, scientific sources should generally be preferred. I would be interested in hearing from other projects how you handle scientific and journalistic sources! Now, I do the major part of my work in en:WP, but my impression is that in de:WP, poor humanities coverage is far less of a problem. To provide some anecdotal evidence, the German article on Plato is a featured article that runs to the length of a small book: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platon Socrates is a GA. Philosophy itself is a featured article. All in all, the WikiProject Philosophy page on the German Wikipedia http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Philosophie/Ausgezeichnete_Artikel lists 33 featured philosophy articles, and 62 good articles. (And that appears to be an incomplete list. I will ask the author of the Platon article to have a look at this discussion, perhaps he can add some background.) In comparison, en:WP has a total of 12 featured articles in the areas of philosophy and psychology *combined*. They are: Attachment theory · Conatus · Confirmation bias · Free will · Getting It: The Psychology of est · Eric A. Havelock · Philosophy of mind · Hilary Putnam · Reactive attachment disorder · Transhumanism · A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · Bernard Williams There are 18 English GAs in Philosophy, and they are: Philosophers: Adelman, Howard – Al-Kindi – Ayn Rand – Eckhart Tolle – Fodor, Jerry – Ramasamy, Periyar E. V. – Ramprasad Sen – Sanger, Larry – Shah, Idries – Sun Tzu – (10 articles) Philosophies and movements: CrimethInc. – Cynicism – Power: A New Social Analysis – Two-level utilitarianism – (4 articles) Philosophical topics: Alvin Plantinga's free will defense – Conscience – Consolation of Philosophy – Eliminative materialism – (4 articles) Eckhart Tolle, Larry Sanger and CrimethInc are not exactly ... how shall I put this ... I shan't bother, you probably guess what I mean. I do believe the fact that there is less of a culture of scholarly source research in en:WP, and a preference of press sources over scholarly sources, especially in the humanities, impacts very negatively on en:WP's performance in this area. I accept that en:WP may have the opposite problem in some areas, where editors seek to exclude notable views "because they were not written by scholars", but on the whole I prefer the German system. The level of coverage becomes more serious, more intelligent, and more encyclopedic. This attracts like-minded contributors. The en:WP culture attracts a different kind of editor, a type of editor who doesn't like scholarly sources very much, making the problem self-perpetuating. Beyond a certain signal-to-noise ratio, knowledgeable people will simply vote with their feet, as your colleague did. If en:WP wants competent, intelligent coverage in the humanities, it needs to teach editors the value of researching the most competent, most intelligent sources. These are not generally found in the daily press. Andreas --- On Sat, 2/10/10, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 21:08, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)frontier.com> wrote: I would say that the roots of the problem lay in the bias of the methods of humanities rather than in something inherent to Wikipedia. Unlike in science, just [not all] top scholars in humanities have enough exact methodology. The rest are using various types of mystification to support their own myths. And building knowledge database in open and collaborative manner is mostly in collision with their interests.

on 10/3/10 4:49 AM, David Goodman at dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com wrote: Much of what you say here is true, David. However, the task becomes an arduous one when the students rule the classroom. The prevailing culture in Wikipedia, whose dogma seems to be, "this is our encyclopedia, and no 'expert' is going to tell us what to do", may seem liberating to some, but is preventing the Project from being the truly collaborative one it has the potential to be. Marc Riddell