Philosophy: remind me not to be so stupid, Who needs experts Options

[Peter Damian]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Philosophy

I keep coming back to this page, mainly because it gets 5,000 hits a day (that's nearly 2m people a year rely on it as a source of knowledge about an academic subject. I am taking on 4 people only 1 of whom has any kind of formal qualification that I can see. Someone claims

Kant, in particular, claimed that there were philosophical questions that could only be answered by going beyond reason.

I point out that the guy, by his own admission, has never read any Kant. And someone else claims

Whether someone has read Kant is not relevant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Philosop...uote_of_the_day

Someone please tell me, and keep reminding me, that anyone who gets involved with this project is fundamentally insane. thank you.


(What they are objecting to is a version of the introduction which was written by myself and a professional philosopher and which was good enough to be used by Trinity College Dublin in their prospectus. Let's just step back and see ....)

This post has been edited by Peter Damian:

[Peter Damian]

Well there are some subjects it does pretty well, particularly in the 'definite sciences'. It also does well in those subjects which suit themselves to the compilation of lists - e.g. popular music. If I want to find out about some delta blues singer in the 1920's, often hard to source, then Wikipedia is the place.

There are other subjects where it really is abysmally awful, and my own chosen subject is one of those, if not the very worst. Generally speaking, the humanities fare much worse than the mathematical and definite sciences. I wonder why that is. Is it that the geeks invented the internet, and the geeks tend to favour the technical subjects and definite sciences.

I'll look for some examples. Meanwhile, I agree with Milton that it is amazing it can do it at all, in the sense that it is amazing that dogs can walk on their hind legs. On the other hand, dogs do better on all fours.

The list is still there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dbuckner...hylaughingstock

Some of my favourites:

Wikipedia shouldn't be telling people that Scandinavia is an English-speaking country, that Karl Marx was a contemporary commentator on 1950s politics, that Russell deemed Principia Mathematica somewhat of a success. A reversion war has ensued, understandably I think. I would support locking the page, on a version without the crap obviously. I can see no other way to compel editors to respond to correction of obvious errors on the Talk page rather than just republishing the same errors.

The story of Marxism and Revolution goes all the way back to the French Revolution, where many of the fighters who were more left-wing had lost and the Bourgeois took control. Later in the 19th Century there had been sporadic revolutionary activity throughout Europe. Such was the promise of Marxism to the vast majority of working people that it terrified the politicians and company owners. Along with the French Revolution came major escalations in the activities of secret police. In Russia the Tzar began imprisoning leftists. Many similar actions were taken throughout Europe to quote a well known commentator of that time, "A spectre is haunting Europe".

On the matter raised as to whether the online Stanford Philosophy site is better than wiki, I think most of it would be disallowed here as being Original Research or Essay. So in that sense wiki's philosophy is better. It also has a lot more than Stanford.

As a consequence of the collapse of colonialism and imperialism in the twentieth century, philosophy now is classified according to three major geographical regions, Western philosophy, Eastern philosophy, and African philosophy.

Someone will say "But these things are no longer there, doesn't that prove the system works?". I reply, they were removed by people with formal qualifications, who knew this was nonsense.

This post has been edited by Peter Damian: