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I hope this funds contracting top authors for the Encyclopaedia. If you check an article's authors, you'll see that many are written by experts in their field (
by wolverine876 3y ago
I hope this funds contracting top authors for the Encyclopaedia. If you check an article's authors, you'll see that many are written by experts in their field (professors, high-level practicioners, etc.) and some by leading people in their field. In the past they were written by people like Einstein and Freud. And often articles by leading experts can be very engaging, written with a personality and point of view (though they seem to cover all sides).
But it seems like many of those authors are long retired, maybe dead, and I wonder how old their contribution is (Britannica seems to update it). And many articles say they are written by the 'Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica', though maybe that always was the case.
I have nothing against the editors, but an expert in that domain will have perspective, insight and current knowledge (i.e., not yet in textbooks) that is impossible to match, imho. I'd love to see them again hiring leading people to write.
- jeremyjh 3y agoLuminaries like that also have their hobby horses and grievances that may color their writing. The editors are people doing a lifelong work of curating all kinds of information, including through primary sources such as papers in peer reviewed scholarly journals, such as those written by the contributors you mention. So it stands to reason that there is a core contributed by a leader in their field at the time, which is subsequently maintained by the editors and contributors.
- onemoresoop 3y agoIt would be nice to have contributions from multiple luminaries on the same topic, sometimes as collaborations
- wolverine876 3y agoYes, that would be great. A debate even, though that would be an odd format in an encyclopedia. In Britannica the way it is now, I've noticed that related topics are sometimes written by experts with different viewpoints, and where they overlap you can see the contours of the terrain, so to speak.
- skissane 3y ago> Luminaries like that also have their hobby horses and grievances that may color their writing If you look at specialist academic encyclopaedias (e.g. the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy), very often the article on theory X is written by one of the major proponents of theory X – because only they feel sufficiently motivated to write it, and because the editors think it is charitable to grant the proponent of a theory the opportunity to produce their best defence of it. But, they'll make sure to include coverage of the criticisms of the theory, because that's what an academic is expected to do. And the editors will make sure the article overall, and the coverage of the criticisms in particular, is fair rather than overly slanted – e.g. by recruiting one of those critics as a reviewer.
- dan-robertson 3y agoI think articles having a voice can be a desirable property. I think this makes SEP good, for example.
- medstrom 3y agoSEP?
- andybak 3y agoYes. I also want to know. Edit. Ah! Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. I read back a couple of comments and it clicked
- wolverine876 3y agoEncylopedia. It wasn't created in the 18th century. :)
- CyberDildonics 3y agohttps://sapling.ai/usage/encyclopedia-vs-encyclopaedia https://sapling.ai/usage/encyclopedia-vs-encyclopaedia
- wolverine876 3y agoWhy would I trust that (even if it strongly supports my claim)? And if true, I wonder what it would look like in the absence of Encyclopaedia Britannica, which accounts for 99% of the instances that I've seen the archaic spelling.
- wolverine876 3y agoI agree that the combination of expert and editor is best, but you still want an expert contributing modern information, including what isn't yet in the textbooks. Imagine an expert in CPU manufacturing having written something 15-20 years ago; the editor would have trouble making sure it was now correct and complete.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]