[Foundation-l] Fwd: Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Peter Damian]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Goodman" <dgoodmanny at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, October 04, 2010 12:07 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?


> I am not qualified to judge articles on philosophy on my own
> understanding of the material. I must ask whether you are so very sure
> that academic consensus will endorse your views on the articles
> mentioned that you would be able to write a replacement article, and
> ask for an RfC on it, and convince outsiders  by reference to multiple
> understandable authoritative sources?

I've already mentioned this list, but here again is my analysis of some of 
the Wikipedia articles.

http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/william-of-ockham.html   This is a comment 
on the William of Ockham article.  William was one of England's greatest 
philosophers.  Gets barely a mention in Wikipedia and there a number of 
serious mistakes in the article itself.
http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/07/francesco-patrizi.html Francest Patrizi. 
What a mess
http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/avicennian-logic.html The Avicenna 
articles were so bad it got into the London Spectator.  In this case, there 
was a Wikipedia RfC so you don't have to take my word for it.  This was a 
case of a rogue editor who contributed to 8,115 pages, making 63,298 edits. 
Much of the problem material seems still to be there!
http://logicmatters.blogspot.com/2009/05/wisdom-of-wikipedia.html This is by 
the distinguished philosopher and logician Peter Smith (editor of the 
Journal Analysis for many years).

In my most recent post I commented on this gem here, in the article on 
Aristotle.

  Even Plato had difficulties with logic; although he had a reasonable
  conception of a deducting system, he could never actually construct one 
and
  relied instead on his dialectic. Consequently, Plato realized that a 
method for
  obtaining conclusions would be most beneficial. He never succeeded in 
devising
  such a method, but his best attempt was published in his book Sophist, 
where he
  introduced his division method.