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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows a higher-quality internet is possible
- rndn 11y agoStupid elitist title.
- dang 11y ago> Stupid elitist title. Perhaps, but a comment like this lowers quality even further. Instead, why not suggest a better title? We're always happy to change them when users find a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) way to phrase things. We already changed this one from the baity original title to a more neutral subheading, in accordance with the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- eevilspock 11y agoThe current title, "The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows a less trashy internet is possible", is great. The internet is quite trashy. It has no moderation. Imagine Hacker News without moderation. And yes, the original title was horrible. Wikipedia is another site that makes the Internet less trashy. And it is entirely possible for Wikipedia to become as authoritative as Stanford's.
- Tideflat 11y agoBecause Wikipedia is a work in progress, some articles are fairly authoritative, for example featured or good articles, while some are not, for example an unreferenced stub.
- rndn 11y agoSorry, I wasn't aware that this was a moderated title. Perhaps something like "The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows that high quality online encyclopedias are possible" (not a writer myself). "Trashy" sounds so dismissive, hence elitist in conjunction with "Stanford".
- jkot 11y ago> It now contains nearly 1,500 entries, and changes are made daily. I tried a few entries, it covers history well, but entries about modern philosophy are very biased.
- Retra 11y agoBiased how?
- n0us 11y agomodern or contemporary? Please explain the bias you find in the articles. Having majored in philosophy and used this site extensively I don't recall finding any bias.
- chadzawistowski 11y agoSEP does seem to focus much more strongly on analytic philosophy than continental, although that's arguably a bias of the entire discipline. Jean-Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo, and Luce Irigaray are all missing, for instance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Nancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Nancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianni_Vattimo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianni_Vattimo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray
- dajohnson89 11y agoC'mon. 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.
- hyperpape 11y agoThey also don't have Kripke, Putnam or Fodor. I dare say that going by relative prestige in their philosophical cultures, Kripke is a more startling omission than any of the three you mentioned (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/01/most-important-anglophone-philosophers-1945-2000-the-top-20.html http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/01/most-important...). That's not a point about merit, btw, just about who people would write about if personal articles showed favoritism. 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).
- dang 11y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005709 is related.
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- scythe 11y agoSomething tells me that the S.E.P. does not draw a much higher proportion of female contributors than Wikipedia. For one thing, it wasn't mentioned in the article, and I have the feeling it would've been. 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).
- dalke 11y agoYou are making an argument from silence. "Of course you're just lazy and avoid effort by" expressing that feeling and not doing research. The list of authors for each topic is available at http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html. 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 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 http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan/SWIP/stats.html (or http://lemmingsblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/apa-report-status-of-women-in.html 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?
- pc2g4d 11y agoThe author seems convinced that the SEP is the best and everything else sucks. But the SEP has obvious flaws: articles updated at most once every four years, authors consist only of academics, everything is subject to a central editorial control.
- maldusiecle 11y ago> articles updated at most once every four years 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.
- pc2g4d 11y agoGood call, I misinterpreted that.
- forgotmysn 11y ago> authors consist only of academics I consider that a strength, not a weakness
- notvladputin 11y agoFor certain fields, I would agree. 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.
- forgotmysn 11y agoThat's interesting. Although I think the SEP works as a primarily academic tool, it would be cool if it could be annotated to include links to practical interpretations of the same ideas.
- Strilanc 11y agoThis article says that the SEP is more comprehensive and more authoritative than Wikipedia. I agree that it's more authoritative, what with it being written by authorities in philosophy. But "more comprehensive"...? 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.
- ethanbond 11y agoSomething can be comprehensive without being all-encompassing, no?
- jsprogrammer 11y agoBut, something that is all-encompassing would be more comprehensive than something that is not, yes?
- coldtea 11y agoNot necessarily so in separate fields.
- jfoutz 11y agoGod created everything. That's all-encompassing, but not comprehensive. 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.
- TuringTest 11y ago
- VLM 11y agoI have what might be a "free startup idea". Go ahead, run with it. 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...
- Erik816 11y agoI could be completely wrong about the scope of this project, but that sounds more like something a Stanford computer science intern could bang out pretty quickly as a school project and less like an idea for a separate company.
- csneeky 11y agoSeems like a nice place to read and learn about Philosophy. 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.
- danharaj 11y agoIt's a fantastic place to learn about formal logics and type theories, too.
- hoopd 11y ago> Speaking of holes, the SEP has a rather detailed entry on the topic of holes, and it rather nicely illustrates one of Wikipedia’s key shortcomings. Holes present a tricky philosophical problem, the SEP entry explains: A hole is nothing, but we refer to it as if it were something......If you ask Wikipedia for holes it gives you the young-adult novel Holes and the band Hole. 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 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.
- yk 11y agoWell, "naive" is a term of the trade. So "holes" are a potential problem for nominalists, philosophers who want to claim that only specific objects - that chair - exist. Calling a position that is not influenced by the last three thousand years of meta-physics 'naive' seems to be entirely justified, just as there are naive accounts of physics and computer science.
- hoopd 11y agoHow exactly is naive a term of the trade in philosophy? You, and the article in question, seem to be using it in a way that any grade-schooler would recognize. 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.
- yk 11y ago'naive' means unsophisticated, so in a certain way it is compatible with the meaning a grade-schooler would recognize. However philosophy often is concerned with the meaning of words and so the naive understanding can define the boundaries of an acceptable theories.
- dpkendal 11y agoThe Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography#Oxford_Dictionary_of_National_Biography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biograp...) follows a similar model to the SEP to deliver on the comprehensive/authoritative/up-to-date trifecta. Unfortunately it’s paywalled, unlike SEP, but it’s certainly the best biographical encyclopedia I know of because of this.
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- xiler 11y agoAre there any differences between the models of Scholarpedia and SEP?
- zardo 11y agoScholarpedia is set up in a similar fashion. Each article has a recognized expert in its field assigned as a currator. It is certainly not comprehensive though. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page
- fitzwatermellow 11y agoDoes the SEP have any sort of bearing on the relative trashiness of the rest of the internet? Does any individual site have an imperative to influence the morality of sites it hyperlinks to? Is there some litmus test inbound links must pass before they can be included? And do digital content producers owe allegiance to this unwritten set of dicta invisbili? Or is their obligation solely to economic optimization and a greater global prosperity, where a rising tide lifts all boats? 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!"
- lobo_tuerto 11y agoThey could really use a bigger line height on their texts. It's hard to read with lines close to each other. Did some tests with the browser dev tools and found that 1.8em instead of 1.4em for the body tag do wonders.
- kijin 11y agoAcademic journals, at least in philosophy, tend to have fairly small line heights. Drafts, on the other hand, are almost always double-spaced. I wonder if this affects the editors' perception of what a good line height for authoritative documents might be.
- sytelus 11y agoTL;DR: Crowdsourced content systems can have only 2 of the 3: Authorartive, Comprehensive, Upto date. Systems like Wikipedia and Stackoverflow miss either one or more of these characteristics. The article claims to have found the "solution" to this problem which is simply having experts for high level areas who invite experts for sub-areas to create the content. 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.
- raldu 11y agoExactly. 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".
- veddox 11y agoWhile I unhesitatingly concede that the article is biased in favour of expert editors, I think you slightly miss the point with the following remark: > 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 ;-)
- sciencesama 11y agoneed some more automatic daily titbits and in the line words like a wikipedia board
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- cooper12 11y ago> Any errors reflect poorly on the contributors, and someone who spots a slip-up can talk to a real person about it—neither of which is true with Wikipedia. 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.
- hyperpape 11y agoI spent a little time working on some smaller philosophy articles. No one is really watching.
- ars 11y ago> so all content can be blamed to someone 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.
- cooper12 11y agoBy binary search I'm assuming you mean via the "Revision history search" tool that can be found in the history page right? Yeah there are a bunch of cases where it doesn't work so well, especially if the change happened hundreds of revisions ago, but like you said you can always resort to looking at individual diffs. 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.
- beloch 11y agoMy thesis (physics) intersected with some elements of philosophy in the context of quantum physics, and I googled (using this verb as an alternative to "blundered") upon some SEP entries on the subject. They were emphatically not up to date with what was cutting edge in my field, but what they were was tremendously well researched and in-depth reviews of the foundations. They clued me in to some sources that I never would have considered looking at otherwise, and those sources turned out to be some of the most fascinating reading material I came across in my research. 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.
- mjn 11y agoIt's interesting that philosophy, unlike most other disciplines, has been so good at this. It's not purely the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, either. There's another encyclopedia founded at the same time (both 1995), the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy [1], with a broadly similar mission and also quite a lot of good articles (though fewer than 1500). And there's an excellently organized, continually updated bibliography of philosophy papers, PhilPapers [2]. It's run like the original Yahoo, a big directory with manually curated topic areas. In computer science, we haven't managed to build resources like these. [1] http://www.iep.utm.edu/home/about/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/home/about/ [2] http://philpapers.org/ http://philpapers.org/
- veddox 11y agoAs a cynic, I'd say they have nothing else to do ;-) On a serious note: thumbs up! When are we going to get one in CS or Biology?
- fsiefken 11y agoAs I moderate an interfaith discussion group I was looking for a way to better use the Stanford Encyclopedia offline (printed or as searchable archive) like wikipedia has and found these tools: * Create Offprint pages https://github.com/jgm/sep-offprint https://github.com/jgm/sep-offprint * Latent Semantic Indexing https://github.com/skywalkermml/LSI_on_SEP/blob/master/project_link_and_instructions.pdf https://github.com/skywalkermml/LSI_on_SEP/blob/master/proje... * Quest for making an ePub http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183269 http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183269 * RSS feed generator https://github.com/21zhouyun/SEOP_RSS 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 https://github.com/AFFogarty/SEP-Bot === 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/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/ on philosophical topics now?
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