Dear all,

I sent the following to the main North American academic philosophy mailing list, PHILOSOP.

It would be fantastic if you could take a moment to post something similar to other academic mailing lists. I think we're definitely to the point where we can get a lot more academics on board.

Larry

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 17:43:40 -0700 (PDT) From: lsanger@ross.bomis.com To: PHILOSOP@louisiana.edu Subject: Philosophy articles on Wikipedia to review

Hello,

This is an informal call for review of encyclopedia articles about philosophy. I will try to keep this short.

Begun last January, "Wikipedia" ( http://www.wikipedia.com/ ) is a "wiki"-based encyclopedia. This is a collaborative, open, community- edited encyclopedia, led by me (I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy last year). It has since grown to over 14,000 entries (with over 2,000 more added each month) and has been the subject of coverage by the New York Times and MIT's Technology Review. The contents are "open content," which means roughly the contents will always be freely distributable in any medium.

Wikipedia is loosely associated with the more straight-laced peer reviewed project Nupedia ( http://www.nupedia.com/ ). The pair of websites together constitute the world's first serious open content encyclopedia project.

So far Wikipedia has managed to attract quite a few active academics (but none in philosophy, alas--I'm hoping to attract a few here). To be accurate, however, most of the participants are fairly articulate computer programmers, students, and professionals from around the world. The quality of articles is uneven in places, but constantly improving--and, everything considered, surprisingly good for a project that is as completely open as it is. We edit each others' work, and the results are not perfect, but encouraging.

We could use a few philosophers to help vet (and develop) articles written on philosophical topics. A few articles that I think particularly need some careful attention from philosophers are these:

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Scientific_method http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Atheism http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Postmodernism

There are a lot of other articles, that (unlike these) *I* wrote; I simply pasted the contents in from old lectures, and these need work. Anyway, many other philosophical articles have been started; nearly all of them are works in progress that need your input. The central philosophy jumping-off page is this:

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Philosophy

And if you want to learn more about the project in general, see the welcome page and the FAQ:

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Welcome,_newcomers http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_FAQ

Finally, if you're very skeptical about the very idea of Wikipedia, please see this page, which I wrote specifically for the skeptics:

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia/Our_Replies_to_Our_Critics

Thanks for your attention!

Larry Sanger, Ph.D. Wikipedia main organizer http://www.wikipedia.com/ Editor-in-chief, Nupedia http://www.nupedia.com/