Not a criticism, just curious. Why do you not just improve the article(s) yourself, rather than devising a "plan" to involve many others - which would inevitably take a great deal of time and effort, and not necessarily achieve a much better result?

From: edward@logicmuseum.com To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Thu, 24 May 2012 09:59:01 +0100 Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] A V Denham

Roger said "The board backed "a man with a plan". It does this frequently and I believe the offer is open to ladies too." OK here is a plan. Here http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Expert_outreach it says "Wikimedia UK is working with scientists, scholars, learned societies and funders to help experts improve Wikipedia and its sister projects, bringing their knowledge to the widest possible public." I don't know why Wikipedia officially needs experts, given the proven success of crowdsourcing, but in any case I have many contacts in the expert world of medieval studies, and could certainly help with a plan to improve the pages on the medieval intellectual tradition, which are dire. E.g. the page on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duns_Scotus Scotus, who was one of the most significant medieval thinkers, and a credit to Scotland (or England, actually, given that his birthplace may have in England at the time, although Wikipedia does not mention this).

The current article is in a terrible state. It repeats the legend about Scotus' premature burial, which has for a long time been conclusively refuted http://lyfaber.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/heres-few-weird-quotes-i-ran-across.ht... , and no modern biography mentions it. It says he is the 'founder of Scotism' which is bizarre ('Scotism' so-called was a later idea). It says 'he came out of the Old Franciscan School' which is not mentioned in any modern discussion of Scotus (I suspect it is a plagiarism from the Catholic Encyclopedia). Even more bizarrely it says "Duns Scotus is usually considered the beginning of the formal Scottish tradition of philosophy which moved through Duns Scotus, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid and John Stuart Mill." There is no such movement, at least no direct relationship, and the claim is absurd.

The sections on his thought, like all such sections in the Wikipedia biographies of thinkers, is risibly light. We know very little of the lives of medieval theologians and philosophers, yet we know much about their thought, and a good reference work should reflect this, as well as making the difficulties of their thought intelligible to a general audience. I'm sure crowdsourcing could achieve this, as Thomas Dalton says, but it hasn't so far after more than ten years of Wikipedia. Some of those sections I wrote anyway.

Or compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sum_of_logic, which is merely a list, with the much longer and far more comprehensive article here http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Summa_Logicae_(Ockham) .

Anyway, enough criticism. I have a plan for working with WMUK to improve these articles, and if anyone is interested in the details, let me know.

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