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I agree but are there any other sites such as SEP which are clearly better than Wikipedia in their subject area? I think the level of curation and peer review o

I agree but are there any other sites such as SEP which are clearly better than Wikipedia in their subject area? I think the level of curation and peer review of SEP is unique. Scholarpedia has the right idea but is not comprehensive.

deleted 11y ago
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snori74 11y ago
I hadn't heard of this, so on a whim looked at one article at random - "Nordtvedt effect", then compared to the same on Wikipedia. Here's the first three lines of each: Scholarpedia In the years just prior to Einstein's publication of his Special Relativity theory Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz showed using Maxwell's equations for the electric fields within an object of distributed charge density that the fields would produce inertia in proportion to the object's electric potential energy content... Wikipedia In theoretical astrophysics, the Nordtvedt effect refers to the relative motion between the Earth and the Moon which would be observed if the gravitational self-energy of a body contributed differently to its gravitational mass and inertial mass. If observed, the Nordtvedt effect would violate the strong equivalence... The complete Wikipedia article is much smaller than many, but while the Scholarpedia version is much more complete, it takes a long while to get anywhere. Edit: expanded, changed format.
- duncanawoods 11y ago
  Looking at just those two fragments, I prefer the wikipedia style by a country mile. To me, the scholarpedia style is excessively wordy e.g. "in the years just prior to" and has a tortured sentence construction. Its the type of pretension that stings as you read it whereas I find the wiki style is straight-forward and easy to absorb.
- andreasvc 11y ago
  I don't think it's helpful to pick a single article from either Wikipedia or Scholarpedia and judge the site on that. I do think that the SEP/Scholarpedia model of trusted experts has significant advantages over the Wikipedia model. With Wikipedia it is sometimes painfully obvious that the text is a compromise between different editors.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

snori74 11y ago

I hadn't heard of this, so on a whim looked at one article at random - "Nordtvedt effect", then compared to the same on Wikipedia. Here's the first three lines of each: Scholarpedia In the years just prior to Einstein's publication of his Special Relativity theory Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz showed using Maxwell's equations for the electric fields within an object of distributed charge density that the fields would produce inertia in proportion to the object's electric potential energy content... Wikipedia In theoretical astrophysics, the Nordtvedt effect refers to the relative motion between the Earth and the Moon which would be observed if the gravitational self-energy of a body contributed differently to its gravitational mass and inertial mass. If observed, the Nordtvedt effect would violate the strong equivalence... The complete Wikipedia article is much smaller than many, but while the Scholarpedia version is much more complete, it takes a long while to get anywhere. Edit: expanded, changed format.

duncanawoods 11y ago
Looking at just those two fragments, I prefer the wikipedia style by a country mile. To me, the scholarpedia style is excessively wordy e.g. "in the years just prior to" and has a tortured sentence construction. Its the type of pretension that stings as you read it whereas I find the wiki style is straight-forward and easy to absorb.
andreasvc 11y ago
I don't think it's helpful to pick a single article from either Wikipedia or Scholarpedia and judge the site on that. I do think that the SEP/Scholarpedia model of trusted experts has significant advantages over the Wikipedia model. With Wikipedia it is sometimes painfully obvious that the text is a compromise between different editors.