Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows a higher-quality internet is possible
qz.com
qz.com
Wikipedia is extremely broad. According to the article, the SEP has 1500 entries. Each of those is no doubt better than an individual Wikipedia article (more cohesive, more in-depth, etc), but I bet there's two orders of magnitude more Wiki articles on philosophy (nevermind other topics!). It no doubt has much wider coverage. How's that for "more comprehensive"?
I guess I'm just complaining about stretching a word to mean something more specific than it usually means. I think of comprehensive as including both in-depth focus and wide-ranging reach. So when the article counts only one of those aspects, and omits the other from the checklist, it feels like cherry-picking the outcome.
Another example might be, A correct compiler can compile any valid program. It's all encompassing. An optimizing compiler, that's can't handle template syntax is more comprehensive. Better answers in a narrower field. Finally the template aware optimizing compiler is all-encompassing and more comprehensive.
But I use them both, for different things. The general overview articles are much better at SEP than Wikipedia. But Wikipedia has a lot more narrow articles, on subjects that SEP doesn't cover at all, or mentions only in passing in one paragraph of an article. For example, a huge number of short-to-medium-length biographies of historically important philosophers (SEP instead has a small number of quite lengthy biographies).
I do wish something like SEP existed in more other fields. I don't know of anything like it for computer science, for example.
My impression is that in many cases this is because there were multiple major authors without a master plan for writing the article, so they ended up sort of putting it all in.
For someone (like me!) who's struggling to grasp a subject, seeing a subject described from multiple points of views, targeting varying levels of expertise, can be immensely helpful.
A traditional encyclopedia article, on the other hand, is probably more likely to be well-structured and comprehensive, but ... I think can be harder to grasp for someone that's not quite up to the material.
It may be kind of ugly, but the "Just throw it all in!" approach does have some real merit...
We're getting there! There are currently 793 philosophy articles [1] better than C-class in Wikipedia.
By quality:
* Featured articles: 41 [2]
* Featured lists: 4 [3]
* Good articles: 113 [4]
* B-class articles: 635 [5]
1. Summary table of philosophy articles by quality and importance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Philosophy_articles_b...
2. https://tools.wmflabs.org/enwp10/cgi-bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&...
3. https://tools.wmflabs.org/enwp10/cgi-bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&...
4. https://tools.wmflabs.org/enwp10/cgi-bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&...
5. https://tools.wmflabs.org/enwp10/cgi-bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&...
"complete; including all or nearly all elements or aspects of something"
If we're talking all philosophy articles in all 291 Wikipedias [2], and (generously) assume that the average Wikipedia has 10% as many philosophy-related articles as English Wikipedia, that's 19,339 * 0.10 * 291 = 562,764 philosophy articles on all Wikipedias. That's 3 orders of magnitude more than SEP's 1,500 articles -- although that's not really comparing apples to apples as we're comparing many languages to one.
1. See Total x Total cell at lower right in matrix at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Philosophy_articles_b...
What's not fair is comparing SEP to Wikipedia, which is a different thing. SEP and Wikipedia have entirely different problems to optimise for.
SEP can optimise for article authoritivity & comprehensivity because the rate at which new articles are added is much, much, much, lower than Wikipedia's. SEP don't have an article for new movie releases, books, actors, current affairs.
I have to confess I think the comparison between the two is somewhat disengenuous.
It's like comparing databases that make different CAP theorem trade-offs (and are designed for different scales) in a situation that's favourable to one of them, and reporting it as a fair and objective comparison... I hesitate to give an example because it may start a flamewar, but [dons flame-retardant underpants] it's like saying that SQLite is objectively better than CouchDB because SQLite doesn't have consistency issues.
SEP's model would fall flat on its face if were expected to do Wikipedia's job.
Sometimes it's really hard to figure out what you need to read have a good basis in a new field. If the SEP has pages on it, they're a damned fine place to start.
I don't know why authors think this is different or novel or scale to something akin to Wikipedia or Stackoverflow. In a way, the article doesn't even look honest as it cherry picks examples on SEP that look great and examples on Wikipedia that look bad to justify its grand claims.
The article overall is biased towards authority of some elite "experts" over more democratic, collaborative, community-driven work.
Sketching SEP as the only hero that saves internet from being an information junk while calling rest of the internet as, "thrash leap" is just grandiose. The Internet is full of examples that show "quality" content is possible. And why is the obsession over "quality" content? The internet is not supposed to be only restricted to use of "information retrieval".
In the article, Wikipedians are called, "non-experts", while there are many experts in their field who also contribute to Wikipedia. Speaking of which, why not suggest those "elite" authoritative authors to contribute to Wikipedia?
It is also claimed that, "The internet should look more like the SEP." What? The internet is basically an extension to our capabilities of communication. And how we use it reflects our communication habits. Saying "the internet should be more like SEP" is like saying everyone should communicate informative encyclopedia entries to each other in their daily lives. Variety of other uses of internet, and thus communication, is ignored. The article fails to recognize the value of "piles of opinion, speculation, and misinformation", which eventually make up the "quality" content that it advocates. In fact, as human beings, we are supposed to have all that "speculation", "opinion", and more importantly, "fun".
> In the article, Wikipedians are called, "non-experts", while there are many experts in their field who also contribute to Wikipedia. Speaking of which, why not suggest those "elite" authoritative authors to contribute to Wikipedia?
The problem is not that experts don't contribute to Wikipedia. The problem is that you usually don't know whether or not an expert wrote whatever you are currently reading. What makes SEP different to Wikipedia is that you know exactly who wrote the article (it even gives you the author's email address) and that you know for sure that that person is an expert in his/her field. That is a guarantee that you simply do not have with Wikipedia and many other Internet knowledge resources. This is not to say that all information on Wikipedia is bad, it simply says that you can't have a guarantee.
This, of course, is not only Wikipedia's greatest flaw, it is also its greatest strength. The Wikipedia model sacrifices authoritativeness in favour of being up to date and comprehensive (in the sense of covering all subjects). And that is a valid trade-off for a site that wants to be a knowledge base for the whole world.
The SEP will never reach the size of Wikipedia, but then again, that is not its goal. Its aim is to be an authoritative source for academics in the field of philosophy. Within this well-defined field, it aims to be comprehensive and up to date. It caters to the needs of scholars, who need something (or rather somebody, a physical, known author) that they can actually cite in their own work. Wikipedia can never give that, and neither should it, for then it would no longer be Wikipedia.
Lastly: although I completely understand your criticism of the all-encompassing claim that "the Internet should look more like the SEP", I'm sure most people would agree that it wouldn't hurt to have a few more places around that you know you can trust for serious information. And incidentally, that is just what the author is arguing, if you hadn't taken his subheading out of context ;-)
This is plain dishonest. Wikipedia has dozens of pages on holes, some of which are cultural items and the author cherry-picked two in order to make his point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holes
Moreover, the SEP's description of a hole is so arrogant and condescending it's painful:
> Naive, untutored descriptions of the world treat holes as objects of reference, on a par with ordinary material objects....
Spare me.
I'm not aware of any "naive accounts" of physics or computer science. You might be thinking of "naive algorithms" and "naive approaches" but in those cases the word has a specific meaning which doesn't fit in the context of the above quote.
The world has moved on from this type of grandiose intellectualism for a reason.
Wikipedia articles, on the other hand, tend to have a rather bland writing style, the average of all the people who contributed to an article.
Philosophers are trained not to take such things personally, and to respond as rationally as possible even if they do take it personally. Since a lot of them also spend most their careers relatively isolated from the rest of the world, it's not surprising that they expect their audience to respond in the same way, especially if philosophy students are the intended audience.
No, it's not an improvement. I'm not trying to defend that writing style in any way. The above is just one explanation for why someone who doesn't actually mean to be condescending might nevertheless produce essays that sound condescending to contemporary readers.
* Create Offprint pages https://github.com/jgm/sep-offprint
* Latent Semantic Indexing https://github.com/skywalkermml/LSI_on_SEP/blob/master/proje...
* Quest for making an ePub http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183269
* RSS feed generator https://github.com/21zhouyun/SEOP_RSS
* Mobile apps There are an iOS and Android apps, but I'm not sure if they can be used offline
* Reddit SEP bot autolinking relevant articles https://github.com/AFFogarty/SEP-Bot
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Anybody know what happened to the branched Wikipedia projects that were started because of the editorial quality issue discussion almost 10 years ago like Citizendium? What others were there? How do they compare with the SEP and Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Brittanica or the IEP http://www.iep.utm.edu/ on philosophical topics now?
This is important because it tells us that the differences between S.E.P. and Wikipedia have only to do with subject matter and not procedure. Obviously trolls aren't interested in philosophy. But philosophy, much like Wikipedia, has a big problem with outreach to women.
Also, you know what's better than complaining about a lack of Wikipedia articles about female novelists? Writing one. You know what makes a better story than an empty complaint? The story about what you were about to reply what you thought was going to happen: the story about how your article was rejected by the editors. Of course you're just lazy and avoid effort by assuming it won't work. If you actually write such an article and see it deleted you'll have a leg to stand on and people will want to hear you (also, you can always preserve your hard work in your user-page).
Looking at the "A" list, and using gendered assumptions about first names combined with a few bits of searching: Likely male: 98, Likely female: 16 Unknown: 1. That's ~14% female.
Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia, "between approximately 8.5 and 16 percent—of Wikipedia editors are women"
So overall, you are right in that it does not 'draw a much higher proportion of female contributors than Wikipedia.'
From http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan/SWIP/stats.html (or http://lemmingsblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/apa-report-status-o... ) we see that "21% of employed philosophers are women". These numbers are for the US. A review of some of the authors shows many come from places other than the US, and some are retired, so this 21% isn't a perfect reflection of the available author pool.
It does suggest that women are underrepresented compared to the available author pool. To point out though, the relative under-representation is larger for Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation is aiming for 25% female representation.
If S.E.P.'s percentage were 35%, would it be indicative of over-representation of women as editors? If Wikipedia's were 35%, would it be indicative of under-representation of women as editors?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia#Poten... has a long section about possible reasons for why females might not be participating, and ideas for how to improve the situation, with the explicit belief that higher levels of female participation will lead to a better Wikipedia.
Thus, is the "percentage of women in general [who] would ever be interested in writing for Wikipedia" using the current Wikipedia as the baseline, or some hypothetical best-of-all-possible Wikipedias?
In either case, how do we even go about determining that percentage?
At best this would be a latent variable which depends very much on the model you have. While important, it may be very hard to determine. (Eg, 'happiness' is an important variable, but unlike money, it's hard to measure accurately.)
My model in this case is that the editorial population will be similar to the reader population, but lagging by about 10-20 years.
You've switched the topic to S.E.P. vs. philosophy publications, and observed that women are worse off in the latter, compared to either S.E.P. or Wikipedia.
Which would imply that the S.E.P. has been doing remarkable work to improve gender balance.
What is the gender ratio of the Wikipedia citations?
As a completely irrelevant comment, my intro to logic class, through the philosophy department, was taught by Jaakko Hintikka. It was very odd this evening to learn that he was one of the top philosophers in the world. I had no idea.
Reading it feels more like an old school physical Encyclopedia (e.g., no hyperlinks or people having discussions publicly about the editing process to confuse and concern you). Instead it has just what you need from the one person that knows everything about the thing you are reading about who is the only person with any business writing about it in the first place.
Maybe I'm not understanding this statement properly, but Wikipedia has a history page and uses version control so all content can be blamed to someone. And there is also a talk page to bring up issues.
Do you know how hard it is to track down who authored a particular word in an article? You literally have to click next, next, next over and over and manually scan the diff for your change.
A binary search sometimes works, but if there is an intermediate version that removed and re-added your search term you can fail at that if you get unlucky.
Regardless, someone can be held accountable for the edits, it's just a matter of having to do more work because of the multi-contributor nature of Wikipedia. And in 90% of the cases, the offending statement is the last edit made; people and bots are usually really good at watching pages and recent changes for vandalism.
On a serious note: thumbs up! When are we going to get one in CS or Biology?
Did some tests with the browser dev tools and found that 1.8em instead of 1.4em for the body tag do wonders.
I wonder if this affects the editors' perception of what a good line height for authoritative documents might be.
I tried a few entries, it covers history well, but entries about modern philosophy are very biased.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo, and Luce Irigaray are all missing, for instance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Nancy
That's not bias, that's selective coverage. The term bias in the context of encyclopedia articles means slant, or to use the silly wikipedia terminology, "point of view".
SEP is pretty good about avoiding bias in that sense.
I wonder if there's a tendency to not write articles on living philosophers (as opposed to some particular aspect of their work).
Still, I do suspect there is less work on 20th century Continental philosophy (so far as that's a well defined thing).
The lack of those articles is policy not bias because they are contempry philosophers.
But entry about Colonialism has huge propaganda from Lenin, while not much about positive impact of colonialism.
It has more to do with political economy than dialectical materialism. If you want that, you should read Hegel.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
It seems that SEP's policy is to have articles on either people or topics, but not topics named after people.
SEP has articles on a number of other people who took Marxism and ran with it in different directions, such as Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, and Jacques Derrida, as well as critical theory as a whole. It also has a bunch of other articles on strands of feminism that were deeply influenced by Marx. It is the mark of an important thinker that he shows up all over the place in all sorts of topics.
Whatever you think Marxism is about, I'm pretty sure you can learn about it on SEP. But you can't do that by reading a single article, any more than you can learn a major web framework by reading a single file.
But I do admit that SEP would benefit from more hyperlinks to make related articles more discoverable.
http://plato.stanford.edu/guidelines.html
Articles are supposed to be on issues rather than people with exceptions for historical articles.
The article on colonialism looks pretty good to me, with relativily broad coverage and citations, but it isn't my area of intrest and I don't really have time to read it properly.
Yes. It's true. I've been spending way too much time on SEP ;)
Although I for one would love to see a ClickHole-esque style parody of plato.stanford.edu. "Knobe lifts the veil executives behaving badly, and you won't believe what happens next!"
That's not what this article says. "In exactly four years—or earlier if research has moved on significantly." Four years is the maximum time an article will stay unchanged, not the minimum.
I consider that a strength, not a weakness
However, academic philosophies are only part of the whole field. Practical philosophies, ones that make the topics much more accessible and relevant to everyday life, is another big component. (Mindfulness, stoicism, practical meditation, ethics, etc.)
Until last year, I avoided philosophy because I never found it relevant, interesting, or anything other than navel gazing. It turns out I was only exposed to academic philosophy.
Once I found more practical works, it became much more important to me.
From your profile, you work at the "CNAG DNA sequencing centre in Barcelona", so you know that Google and MS aren't really doing cutting edge work on that area of technology, compared to, say, UC Santa Cruz.
However, you are are a Django developer, so the things you are interested in are more aligned with the types of things that Google and MS work on. Perhaps there's a bias in what you consider to be 'tech'?
I mean, I might not value PHP, Python and Go as a matter of taste, but they have their own ideas worth documenting that were not created by academic researchers. In fact, I'd be suspicious of and programming language reference that was controlled by academics or any group with specific credentials because interesting developments in PL are extremely democratic and happen everywhere. (Including some pretty self-contained bubbles like the world of Chuck Moore and colorForth.)
Given that collyw works in a bioinformatics organization, my underlying question was why collyw discounted all of the cutting edge technology coming out of academic bioinformatics research.
I could also have pointed out, say, cutting edge techniques in photochemistry for arene C-H amination, which came from a university (see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1326 ).
By limiting "tech" to those areas of software where Google and Microsoft have a strong business interest, then of course they will have a strong presence. I wanted to highlight that possible bias.
New methods of analyzing data, which can be implemented as a script, is also new technology. But it sounds like you are excluding it as a possibility.
Again, what do you call "tech"?
Intel provides most of the CPUs that Google, Microsoft, etc. use. Can't I be equally dismissive and say that Intel provides the tech and Google/MS merely run programs on top of it?
Further, I stumbled upon the meme expressed by Perrine [1], etc that tech continuously reinvents the wheel by making same failures or re-inventing same solutions from the past. There's a bunch of tech that hasn't caught up to stuff from 60's-80's in those papers I reference. You'll see me do my part by referencing it in places like this where it might apply. However, it reflects an overall trend that there's tons of wisdom that's not transferred to new tech generation and we need a Standford-style encyclopedia for it all. More likely a collection of books and Wikipedia-style articles so cross-referencing will encourage serendipity.
So, we could really use this. I considered creating one but Jeremy Epstein advised me to get real buy-in from academics first. That such a repository would probably need a lot for it to be effective, using a network effect I'm guessing. That's a lot more work than I have time for right now lol. Nonetheless, we desperately need it for INFOSEC and IT. Just for fun, I'd use only best-of-breed tools and methods its recommends to run the site itself. People would see it in action as they showed up.
[1] https://c59951.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/5085-1255-perrine.pdf
But your second and third complains are about process rather than result. What exactly do you think could be better about the SEP if they had non-academic authors? Or decentralized control? Not in a hypothetical world where the editors are evil, but in the real actual world?
I think the answer is "not much, and lots would be worse", because those properties are key to the SEP's success. This is different than Wikipedia, which has a much broader mission and would be crippled by these restrictions.
The centralized, academic nature of SEP is fine for them, but it must result in a sort of elite bias. In my mind, that's a kind of limitation. I actually prefer the Wikipedia approach or something along those lines, which I do feel is often effective at capturing various viewpoints.
Ultimately, there exists no one perfect approach to online encyclopedia compilation. Pros and cons all around.
If you pay a very modest sum (annoying payment system, not smooth as top of the line systems) to join "the friends of the SEP", you can become a human drone emulating Amazon's kindle system where you download PDFs by hand for you to maintain and view by hand on your ebook reader or whatever, and they email you if an article on your watchlist is later updated so you can pull your new updated copy (seriously, not a joke). It is a 1980s to 90s era manual labor workflow.
Someone/something should USEFULLY middleman and publish to amazon kindle for SEP. Handle aggregation of small articles into texts (the whole thing? or themes? or by letter?), handle the periodic download and release process, basically the content provider gives them a copyright release and in trade 90% or whatever of amazon revenue goes back to SEP. Can it be automated in bulk so it doesn't have to be done by hand? Probably. Are there sites other than SEP who could expand into this? Probably.
See thats how to find a startup idea. I looked at downloading pdfs from SEP, said to myself, "what a manual PITA that needs to be automated away", figured other people and places could benefit by a little automation...
This idea would never be a billion dollar unicorn, but the general concept of a "non-technologically obsolete middleman who actually provides real 2010s era value in the book publishing industry" isn't all that far fetched of an idea and would probably run a profit.
That could pivot later into "and this is how a REAL 2010s era book publisher works" perhaps including paper products, who knows. Or other forms of digital content. Not having the legacy would seem to be a benefit for a new publisher...
like a wikipedia board