New subject: A V Denham

24 May 2012

Roger said "The board backed "a man with a plan". It does this frequently 
and I believe the offer is open to ladies too." OK here is a plan. Here 
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Expert_outreach it says "Wikimedia UK is 
working with scientists, scholars, learned societies and funders to help 
experts improve Wikipedia and its sister projects, bringing their knowledge 
to the widest possible public." I don't know why Wikipedia officially needs 
experts, given the proven success of crowdsourcing, but in any case I have 
many contacts in the expert world of medieval studies, and could certainly 
help with a plan to improve the pages on the medieval intellectual 
tradition, which are dire. E.g. the page on 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duns_Scotus Scotus, who was one of the most 
significant medieval thinkers, and a credit to Scotland (or England, 
actually, given that his birthplace may have in England at the time, 
although Wikipedia does not mention this).

The current article is in a terrible state.  It repeats the legend about 
Scotus' premature burial, which has for a long time been conclusively 
refuted 
http://lyfaber.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/heres-few-weird-quotes-i-ran-across.h… , 
and no modern biography mentions it. It says he is the 'founder of Scotism' 
which is bizarre ('Scotism' so-called was a later idea). It says 'he came 
out of the Old Franciscan School' which is not mentioned in any modern 
discussion of Scotus (I suspect it is a plagiarism from the Catholic 
Encyclopedia). Even more bizarrely it says "Duns Scotus is usually 
considered the beginning of the formal Scottish tradition of philosophy 
which moved through Duns Scotus, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid and 
John Stuart Mill." There is no such movement, at least no direct 
relationship, and the claim is absurd.

The sections on his thought, like all such sections in the Wikipedia 
biographies of thinkers, is risibly light. We know very little of the lives 
of medieval theologians and philosophers, yet we know much about their 
thought, and a good reference work should reflect this, as well as making 
the difficulties of their thought intelligible to a general audience. I'm 
sure crowdsourcing could achieve this, as Thomas Dalton says, but it hasn't 
so far after more than ten years of Wikipedia. Some of those sections I 
wrote anyway.

Or compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sum_of_logic, which is merely a 
list, with the much longer and far more comprehensive article here 
http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Summa_Logicae_(Ockham) .

Anyway, enough criticism. I have a plan for working with WMUK to improve 
these articles, and if anyone is interested in the details, let me know.

Re: [Wikimediauk-l] A V Denham