[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Peter Damian]

Some excellent comments in the last few posts.  To address a few.

1.  On the idea that scholars in the humanities don't know how to work 
together: definitely not!!  I myself am working on a collaborative project 
(a translation of Duns Scotus) with someone in the US.  I have never met 
this person, but we have worked together by email for more than two years on 
a large project.  I have never had any trouble working with him, apart 
occasional complaints about the speed of progress.  We have met many 
substantive issues about which there is disagreement and potential conflict. 
In every case we have met this by reasoned argument, evidence, sourcing and 
so on.  Occasionally we have had resort to third party views, but only when 
we agreed the problem was too difficult for us to resolve.  And the third 
parties were taken from our small community of co-workers, which is evidence 
in itself that we are a community, used to working together. As further 
evidence, consider the great translation of St Thomas's Summa Theologiae 
into English in the 1930s.  A huge undertaking, made by many translators 
working together in harmony.  A sample here 
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm .  So, humanities scholars often 
work together, often in large groups.

2.  More pertinent is Michael's comment "With mythology or other humanities 
subjects, the academic paper may rely  on some facts or things that are very 
nearly facts, assumptions that  have universal acceptance though they may 
not be provable in the usual  scientific sense."  Again, humanities scholars 
have worked out methods of dealing with the problem that 'facts' in the 
humanities aren't as clear-cutand decidable as facts in the hard sciences. 
Whereas any component mathematician knows what Cantor's or Goedel's proof 
is, to state the key ideas of Aristotle in a paragraph is much harder.  But 
we have worked out ways of dealing with this, and that is part of every 
student's training.  Indeed the idea of 'primary' vs 'secondary' source 
comes not from the hard sciences, but from the humanities (from textual 
criticism, I think, but I am not sure).  As an example of this, consider the 
well-known distinction between Anglo-American 'analytic' philosophy and 
'Continental' philosophy.  This is profound, yet because we all have a 
common humanities background, we are able to work together on Wikipedia. 
There are about 4 academically trained editors working on Philosophy in 
Wikipedia, 2 from the Anglo background, 2 from the Continental.  I have 
never known any disagreement among this group.  The big disagreements come 
about in the edit wars between the academically trained philosophers and the 
untrained ones, for example the 'Objectivists' or disciples of Ayn Rand. 
These have had no formal training in the way of resolving disputes and the 
way of resolving difficult problems that is essential to academic training.

In summary, the problem is not that humanities scholars cannot work 
together.  Many of them do, sometimes in large groups.  And the problem is 
not that there is no method of working problems out.  Such methods are 
integral to training in the humanities.  (Indeed, that is the main component 
of such training - it's not the content of what you learn that is important, 
it is the well-defined methods of approaching problems).  In my experience 
the problem of humanities in Wikipedia is that the methods and training of 
the 'experts' is so fundamentally different from that of 'Wikipedians' (who 
by and large have no training at all) that disputes nearly always turn ugly.