On 8/10/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Milos Rancic wrote:
- Encyclopedia follows scientific method, not religious, not political. *
Put this way, your statement sounds far more like a religious dogma than a scientifically established truth.
I would like to know what was in my statement like a religious dogma (private mail would be good enough; I just want to know what is wrong).
Let's apply the scientific method: I propose an alternative truth, and we'll see if you can prove me wrong. I suggest that "scientific" is a word used in the *marketing* of traditional encyclopedias, that has little or no real meaning for the actual contents. The term is used because it has prevailed in marketing. If two competing encyclopedias were equal (do we have any examples?) except for the use of the word "scientific", the one that used "scientific" in its self-description would sell better. In many cases, that an encyclopedia describes it self as "scientific" often means nothing more than people employed in science (well-known professors) have contributed articles.
I used "scientific" in very exact sense of "scientific method", not as a marketing.
In fact, "compiled by prominent scholars" is an even stronger marketing term than "scientific" for an encyclopedia. This is "the authoritarian trick" that Citizendium tries to pull on Wikipedia. It would be interesting to know what effect that difference in marketing would have if the contents were comparable.
I agree that there is/were a lot of propaganda by of traditional encyclopedias. Also, Wikipedia has the best *encyclopedic* (and because of that scientific) principles in comparison to other encyclopedias (I think that a lot of articles in Britannica wouldn't pass our NOR, NPOV nor V conditions). (Of course, I don't know anything about some other, not well known encyclopedias; but according to Serbian, Croatian etc. encyclopedias, I may say that they have just a lot more problems then Britannica has.)
But the contents of CZ and WP are not comparable. Wikipedia wins in comprehensiveness. And this is "the size trick" of encyclopedia marketing, as in "20 volumes must be better than 10". Just look at the Spanish "Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana" (70 volumes, 1908-1930). If the size trick was useless, this venture would go bancrupt, but they didn't and they were able to output a 10 volume appendix in 1930-1933. Apparently they were very successful. But just how scientific were they?
...
In order to be scientific, we must dare to question the need for being scientific.
It is good to think about successfulness of Wikipedia, but our primary goal is not to be successful, but to make encyclopedia. And encyclopedia is a scientific project, like astronomy is a science.
While I don't think anything against trying to make something different, it is not possible to build encyclopedia outside of scientific method, like it is not possible to research physical laws outside of it.
The fact that so much discussion within Wikipedia now focuses on verifyability and being scientific, is only explained by the fact that raw size has already been taken care of. (The Spanish Enciclopedia universal was 165 million words, a size that the English Wikipedia database passed in March 2005.) It is not a sign of scientificality (?) being the most important.
Yes, we started with another phase of building Wikipedia. For a couple of big projects it is not anymore important how big they are, but how encyclopedic are they. When you are building community, it is hard to be strict in using well known principles. (Actually, it very often goes to not imposing some principles because of community building.)