A few posts back Peter linked to several philosophy-trained editors who had left Wikipedia, representing them as examples of the problems he has identified. I think it's worth reposting here what one of those editors gave as his reasons for leaving: [quote] 1. No one is accountable, nor does anyone feel responsible, for the accuracy of Wikipedia articles, since they are unsigned and have no official authors. 2. There is virtually no incentive to work on them. a. Doing so is extremely time-consuming. People who write traditional encyclopedia articles also expend a lot of time. However, they are typically repaid in one or more of three ways: with money, with recognition or prestige, and with the chance to gently support what they see as the right view of the subject. However: b. One is paid nothing to write or edit Wikipedia articles. c. One gets no recognition or prestige, since the articles are unsigned. d. One gets no chance to forward what one sees as the correct views, because of the NPOV policy. e. Finally, one can't even link to one's own relevant papers on the subject, since there seems to be an unofficial policy to automatically delete such links. So the deal is: spend hour upon hour doing web editing, and you can be sure of getting nothing in return. 3. Genuine experts in a subject are usually people who have other demands on their time--often professors, for example, who could spend their time working with their own students or doing research in their field that they'll get credit for. So just thinking of these factors a priori, it seems unlikely that many experts would contribute to Wikipedia. 4. It's true that if someone sees an error in an article they can fix it. But it's also true that others can introduce new errors. And the people most likely to see errors and not introduce new ones, are the experts who seem to have no incentive to contribute. --owl23211:58, 3 January 2006 (UTC) [/quote] So what can we learn from these clearly stated objections, and how do they apply to the general problem of articles in the humanities? Nathan

----- 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? I have already pointed out (and you agreed) that Wikipedia requires a different style and approach from the one of, say, the SEP. It is supposed to be a comprehensive and reliable reference source. There are only a handful of experts on philosophy in Wikipedia, and they are pretty demoralized. When are you going to clean up this mess, David? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age You said you were going to, some time. Or this one? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence If there are so many experts, why are these articles in such a complete mess? We are not talking about a 'journal in the field'. We are talking about a basic introductory article to a subject which in any comprehensive reference work would be treated with care and respect. Why is there no proper article on Theology? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology . And why is this one - a basic subject - such a mess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_theology ? Without experts to tell you there is a problem, you aren't going to realise there is one, I suppose. With every kind wish. Peter

On 28 September 2010 12:38, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: I predict Wikipedia's biology articles will far outshine its philosophy articles for the simple fact that the biologists bother: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.100… They bothered paying author's fees for publication in a peer-reviewed specialist journal in their field, just to increase the quality of Wikipedia articles in their field. They're hardly going to rack up citation credits for an article on how to teach biology to the general public. With some fields going to this effort and not others, ultimately it's up to the specialists in the fields themselves to bother. So what do the biologists have that the philosophers - or other fields that are ill-represented in Wikipedia - lack? (That article is great, by the way. It gives strong reasons for experts to put in the effort to bother.) - d.

On 2 October 2010 07:58, Peter Damian <peter.damian(a)btinternet.com> wrote: That's wonderfully poetic and doesn't answer the question I asked: *what* about the approach in this paper wouldn't work for philosophy, in your opinion? Please be specific. - d.

On 2 October 2010 10:28, Peter Damian <peter.damian(a)btinternet.com> wrote: At this point it may be useful to distinguish "fault", "blame" and "agent who could take action." Philosophers are not passive planted creatures, but active human agents who can decide to do something or not. Your aim (better philosophy articles) might be realised by changing Wikipedia to suit philosophers, but it's reasonably clear from this thread that this is unlikely to happen. This means alternate approaches might be worth considering, to the end of better philosophy articles in Wikipedia. As such, and in the interest of better philosophy articles on Wikipedia, could you please go through that list and tell me which ones philosophers in particular will balk at? Not just you personally (though that too), but others. - d.

To avoid any confusion here, my point was that: 1. None of the items on this list http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.100… would be balked at by philosophers. Philosophers already address most of these basic principles in their own work. 2. Equally, none of them, singly or collectively, would in my view address the problem of why philosophy is such a problem in Wikipedia. Philosophers already address most of these basic principles in their own work, and they apply them on Wikipedia. They haven't worked. Philosophy is worse now than in 2005 (2007at the latest).

on 10/2/10 6:01 AM, SlimVirgin at slimvirgin(a)gmail.com wrote: Very well said, SV. I encounter the same thing in my field. You cannot teach someone who will not be taught. You cannot teach someone something they think they already know. Marc Riddell

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

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.