4 ms·

It sounds like a cool idea if I get it right (organize links to wikipedia articles in a way that could correspond to a curriculum), but the quality of the curat

by c7b 4y ago

It sounds like a cool idea if I get it right (organize links to wikipedia articles in a way that could correspond to a curriculum), but the quality of the curation at least for mathematics looks abysmal. Here are some of the top-level categories: * Charles Sanders Peirce (the only (!) mathematician with a top-level category to himself, who's arguably more of a philosopher actually) - 46 pages. * Set theory - 3 pages * Theory of summation of natural numbers - empty This fails to be useful for students at so many levels. The entries are at completely inconsistent levels of granularity or concepts, it fails to make any meaningful selection or ranking by importance (another example, it has a top-level category for Chaos Theory but none for Dynamical Systems). And, most importantly, it doesn't correspond to how university curriculums are structured and doesn't work as a useful guide for self-study. But yeah, it's a wiki, so I guess I shouldn't complain but instead just contribute to improving it.

User23 4y ago
> Charles Sanders Peirce (the only (!) mathematician with a top-level category to himself, who's arguably more of a philosopher actually) He was something of an intellectual generalist sure. Nevertheless his work in logic was world class. For example he independently discovered the universal and existential quantifiers about the same time Frege did.
- c7b 4y ago
  Sure, this wasn't meant as a judgement. Logic straddles mathematics and philosophy (and CS), and being considered the founder of an important philosophical school is arguably one of the biggest achievements possible for a scholar, so that's where I'd put the emphasis. The more important point was how bizarre it is to single him out on the landing page for 'Mathematics'.
  - User23 4y ago
    Fair enough. I'm a bit of a Peirce fanboy, so there's that. Contemporary Philosophy has more or less utterly abandoned Peirce's chief aims, which were to achieve clarity and distinctness for our conceptions of things. So much so that I'd consider calling someone a philosopher to be at best a back-handed compliment. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware there are philosophers working today who hope for more than the approbation of their fellows, but they're rare and they're not who most people think of when they hear the word. Peirce is probably the greatest American-born logician to live, and probably deserves to be on the short list of great American-born scientists (broadly construed in the 19th century and earlier sense) like Franklin and Gibbs, but yeah I agree that he's an odd choice for the first name on a mathematics landing page. Maybe one day I'll write a graphical Prolog dialect based on his existential graphs[1]. [1] http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514.htm http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514.htm
tgv 4y ago
Of course you can criticize. I find the attitude "you can't complain if you don't improve it" ridiculous. I checked Cognitive Psychology. Here's the page on "Brain": https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Brain https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Brain. That's not a learning resource, and certainly not a universitary one. I've seen better explanations in toddler's books. And "Socialism" is under Social Sciences. Teaching is a skill and a job, and above all requires a lot of effort. Passing off some slapdash collection of texts as education is absurd.
- rglullis 4y ago
  Criticism is not the problem. The problem is when people stop at it. It's a wiki. If you think it can be improved, go ahead. There is nothing between you and the edit button.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Maybe he'll get round to that after he's forked and fixed every non-functional OSS library on Github? The problem is the poorly written abandonware, not the fact that people whose problem the libraries didn't solve didn't see fit to write their own solution and submit a pull request. This is a project dating back to 2006 to supposedly produce a university standard educational resource. If even a layman with no subject knowledge whatsoever can point out its not good enough, the problem isn't that the layman didn't take up the invitation to produce the thousands of pages of academic-level content themselves...
    - rglullis 4y ago
      > people whose problem the libraries didn't solve didn't see fit to write their own solution and submit a pull request. Nice strawman you got there. It's not like the only way to contribute is by solving the problem in its entirety. I'm just saying that nothing improves if people stop at the criticism. > This is a project dating back to 2006 (...) even a layman with no subject knowledge whatsoever can point out its not good enough. Put another way, you can say that this is a project that failed to attract people who are interested in contributing. It's not bad because lots of people are working on it and "bad content". It's bad for lack of input. Criticizing for lack of adoption is what feels weird.

by c7b 4y ago

User23 4y ago

> Charles Sanders Peirce (the only (!) mathematician with a top-level category to himself, who's arguably more of a philosopher actually) He was something of an intellectual generalist sure. Nevertheless his work in logic was world class. For example he independently discovered the universal and existential quantifiers about the same time Frege did.

c7b 4y ago
Sure, this wasn't meant as a judgement. Logic straddles mathematics and philosophy (and CS), and being considered the founder of an important philosophical school is arguably one of the biggest achievements possible for a scholar, so that's where I'd put the emphasis. The more important point was how bizarre it is to single him out on the landing page for 'Mathematics'.
- User23 4y ago
  Fair enough. I'm a bit of a Peirce fanboy, so there's that. Contemporary Philosophy has more or less utterly abandoned Peirce's chief aims, which were to achieve clarity and distinctness for our conceptions of things. So much so that I'd consider calling someone a philosopher to be at best a back-handed compliment. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware there are philosophers working today who hope for more than the approbation of their fellows, but they're rare and they're not who most people think of when they hear the word. Peirce is probably the greatest American-born logician to live, and probably deserves to be on the short list of great American-born scientists (broadly construed in the 19th century and earlier sense) like Franklin and Gibbs, but yeah I agree that he's an odd choice for the first name on a mathematics landing page. Maybe one day I'll write a graphical Prolog dialect based on his existential graphs[1]. [1] http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514.htm http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514.htm

tgv 4y ago

Of course you can criticize. I find the attitude "you can't complain if you don't improve it" ridiculous. I checked Cognitive Psychology. Here's the page on "Brain": https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Brain https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Brain. That's not a learning resource, and certainly not a universitary one. I've seen better explanations in toddler's books. And "Socialism" is under Social Sciences. Teaching is a skill and a job, and above all requires a lot of effort. Passing off some slapdash collection of texts as education is absurd.

rglullis 4y ago
Criticism is not the problem. The problem is when people stop at it. It's a wiki. If you think it can be improved, go ahead. There is nothing between you and the edit button.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Maybe he'll get round to that after he's forked and fixed every non-functional OSS library on Github? The problem is the poorly written abandonware, not the fact that people whose problem the libraries didn't solve didn't see fit to write their own solution and submit a pull request. This is a project dating back to 2006 to supposedly produce a university standard educational resource. If even a layman with no subject knowledge whatsoever can point out its not good enough, the problem isn't that the layman didn't take up the invitation to produce the thousands of pages of academic-level content themselves...
  - rglullis 4y ago
    > people whose problem the libraries didn't solve didn't see fit to write their own solution and submit a pull request. Nice strawman you got there. It's not like the only way to contribute is by solving the problem in its entirety. I'm just saying that nothing improves if people stop at the criticism. > This is a project dating back to 2006 (...) even a layman with no subject knowledge whatsoever can point out its not good enough. Put another way, you can say that this is a project that failed to attract people who are interested in contributing. It's not bad because lots of people are working on it and "bad content". It's bad for lack of input. Criticizing for lack of adoption is what feels weird.