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(a)logicmuseum.com
To: wikimediauk-l(a)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.h… ,
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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