On 17/06/2014 00:28, Kevin Gorman wrote:
Hi Ed - I'm not sure what your area of specialty is offhand,
This http://cuapress.cua.edu/res/docs/Fall-2014-Catalog.pdf#page=17 will be published in September this year, about the early philosophy of the medieval theologian Duns Scotus. My focus is on philosophy and logic, primarily of the middle ages (a period covering more than a thousand years) but also modern analytic philosophy and philosophy of language. Philosophy generally is an area that is very poorly covered on Wikipedia.
There is the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html but that is not written for the general reader and even specialists in one area might have problems with articles in another area http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modeltheory-fo .
There is a similar problem with Wikipedia mathematics and mathematical logic articles, by the way. Unlike articles in my area, they seem to be correct, but they are not written in a style that is accessible to the general reader.
On 17/06/2014 00:23, Steven Walling wrote:
The Wikimedia Foundation does not write nor edit content on Wikipedia, nor does it dictate editorial policy.
I am aware of that, but (a) does that have to be the case anyway? If the model clearly isn’t working, why not consider another model?
And (b) isn’t the role of the WMF rather like that of the owner of a large plot of land to be used as a garden. The owner doesn’t do the gardening directly, but is involved with supplies of fertiliser, weedkiller, pest control and so on.
Or (c) perhaps the answer might be to help buy the land for other gardens, unconnected with the original one? I have recently been talking to the owners of other specialist sites, whose coverage is better than Wikipedia’s. Perhaps the Foundation could help them with software development, or even persuade them to use Mediawiki (which IMO is excellent for this purpose, but needs selling).
"Pretty much any article in my specialist area (which is actually not
all that specialist) has serious problems" is to invite you to edit it.
See geni’s remark below. I can’t edit, and even if I could, it would not address the general problem of getting specialists involved. I am still in touch with some of the specialists in my area who used to edit Wikipedia. Recently I had lunch in London with Julie Hofmann (was, user:JHK, who was recruited by Larry Sanger and who left in 2002. They all say the same thing: Wikipedia is not a welcoming place for experts. Pretty much everyone who was working in my subject has left a long time ago.
On 17/06/2014 00:32, geni wrote:
User:Peter Damian is currently subject to a community ban on the
English wikipedia.
‘Community ban’ is a misleading term, implying the whole community, which it doesn’t. My ban was unconnected with the quality of the content I contributed. And see my reply to Steven Walling above. One person is not going to make a whole lot of difference. The problem is with the garden and the soil, not a single plant.
I don’t see why the WMF couldn’t provide help and advice here. If there really is an appetite for change – and it really is needed – then now is a good time to discuss it.
Edward