3 ms·

I find wikipedia articles extremely poor on philosophy. SEP is without a doubt the primary resource.

dr_dshiv 6y ago
Which articles do you find extremely poor? I love reading about classical philosophy on wikipedia, it's like reading with article-size foot notes.
crazygringo 6y ago
Wikipedia is utterly fantastic for discovering about philosophy -- for getting the lay of the land of the different strands, concepts and philosophers. There's literally no better, unbiased, objective introduction than: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy (For comparison, every intro-to-philosophy book or textbook I've ever come across has omitted huge swathes of what's in Wikipedia's intro article -- not just not going into depth on them, but not even mentioning them once. But because Wikipedia is collaboratively edited, those kinds of lacunae are much less likely to exist.) Once you've identified the relevant topic/debate you're interested in and want to actually see what the "current" (within the past decade) state of debate is, then you reach for the SEP for an overview on a very specific subject. Then you look up the relevant references using Google Scholar and explore using "cited by" and "related" to survey the entire literature related to it. This model has worked very successfully for me. None of the three levels -- Wikipedia, SEP, Scholar -- is any better or worse than the others. They serve different purposes. Each is the best at its level.
igravious 6y ago
Wikidata (Wikipedia's younger structured data semantic web resource) has entries for 13,000+ philosophers -- an order of magnitude more than the largest and most complete encyclopedia of philosophy which by my reckoning is not the SEP (as people seem to think here) but Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Philosophy Give that the "Print Edition is $1693 as of May 2017" the SEP is slightly cheaper. How did they achieve that enormous amount? Through the collaborative magic of the Wikipedia model.

Which articles do you find extremely poor? I love reading about classical philosophy on wikipedia, it's like reading with article-size foot notes.

crazygringo 6y ago

Wikipedia is utterly fantastic for discovering about philosophy -- for getting the lay of the land of the different strands, concepts and philosophers. There's literally no better, unbiased, objective introduction than: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy (For comparison, every intro-to-philosophy book or textbook I've ever come across has omitted huge swathes of what's in Wikipedia's intro article -- not just not going into depth on them, but not even mentioning them once. But because Wikipedia is collaboratively edited, those kinds of lacunae are much less likely to exist.) Once you've identified the relevant topic/debate you're interested in and want to actually see what the "current" (within the past decade) state of debate is, then you reach for the SEP for an overview on a very specific subject. Then you look up the relevant references using Google Scholar and explore using "cited by" and "related" to survey the entire literature related to it. This model has worked very successfully for me. None of the three levels -- Wikipedia, SEP, Scholar -- is any better or worse than the others. They serve different purposes. Each is the best at its level.

igravious 6y ago

Wikidata (Wikipedia's younger structured data semantic web resource) has entries for 13,000+ philosophers -- an order of magnitude more than the largest and most complete encyclopedia of philosophy which by my reckoning is not the SEP (as people seem to think here) but Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Philosophy Give that the "Print Edition is $1693 as of May 2017" the SEP is slightly cheaper. How did they achieve that enormous amount? Through the collaborative magic of the Wikipedia model.