5 ms·

The 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, au

by pc2g4d 11y ago

The 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 ago
  Good call, I misinterpreted that.
forgotmysn 11y ago
> authors consist only of academics I consider that a strength, not a weakness
- notvladputin 11y ago
  For 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 ago
    That'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.
- collyw 11y ago
  Do you think that holds for tech? I hear a lot more cutting edge stuff coming out of Googe or MS than I do from universities.
  - dalke 11y ago
    What do you call "tech"? 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'?
    - tikhonj 11y ago
      Well, I can't say much for bioinformatics, but we certainly can't discount industry and open-source projects in the fields I'm familiar with like distributed systems and programming languages. 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.)
      - dalke 11y ago
        Of course we can't discount them. My own field of research, chemical information as it applies to pharmaceutical research, is dominated by industry. 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 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.
jessriedel 11y ago
Your first complaint ("updated at most once every four years") is fine, except that it's not that big of a deal for a 3000 year old field. As another comments stated, topics that are changing rapidly are updated more frequently. 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.
- austenallred 11y ago
  Right; even Wikipedia admits it may get to the point where most of the articles are reviewed by experts and locked to some degree.
- pc2g4d 11y ago
  Good point---for philosophy, the slow updates aren't a huge issue. But the article seemed to be holding up the SEP as a model for other endeavors, and this seems to limit its usefulness in many other areas. 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.

by pc2g4d 11y ago

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 ago
Good call, I misinterpreted that.

forgotmysn 11y ago

> authors consist only of academics I consider that a strength, not a weakness

notvladputin 11y ago
For 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 ago
  That'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.
collyw 11y ago
Do you think that holds for tech? I hear a lot more cutting edge stuff coming out of Googe or MS than I do from universities.
- dalke 11y ago
  What do you call "tech"? 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'?
  - tikhonj 11y ago
    Well, I can't say much for bioinformatics, but we certainly can't discount industry and open-source projects in the fields I'm familiar with like distributed systems and programming languages. 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.)
    - dalke 11y ago
      Of course we can't discount them. My own field of research, chemical information as it applies to pharmaceutical research, is dominated by industry. 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 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.

jessriedel 11y ago

Your first complaint ("updated at most once every four years") is fine, except that it's not that big of a deal for a 3000 year old field. As another comments stated, topics that are changing rapidly are updated more frequently. 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.

austenallred 11y ago
Right; even Wikipedia admits it may get to the point where most of the articles are reviewed by experts and locked to some degree.
pc2g4d 11y ago
Good point---for philosophy, the slow updates aren't a huge issue. But the article seemed to be holding up the SEP as a model for other endeavors, and this seems to limit its usefulness in many other areas. 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.