On 8/10/07, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
Milos Rancic wrote:
* Encyclopedia follows scientific method, not
religious, not political. *
Put this way, your statement sounds far more like a religious
dogma than a scientifically established truth.
I would like to know what was in my statement like a religious dogma
(private mail would be good enough; I just want to know what is
wrong).
Let's apply the scientific method: I propose an
alternative truth,
and we'll see if you can prove me wrong. I suggest that
"scientific" is a word used in the *marketing* of traditional
encyclopedias, that has little or no real meaning for the actual
contents. The term is used because it has prevailed in marketing.
If two competing encyclopedias were equal (do we have any
examples?) except for the use of the word "scientific", the one
that used "scientific" in its self-description would sell better.
In many cases, that an encyclopedia describes it self as
"scientific" often means nothing more than people employed in
science (well-known professors) have contributed articles.
I used "scientific" in very exact sense of "scientific method", not
as
a marketing.
In fact, "compiled by prominent scholars" is
an even stronger
marketing term than "scientific" for an encyclopedia. This is
"the authoritarian trick" that Citizendium tries to pull on
Wikipedia. It would be interesting to know what effect that
difference in marketing would have if the contents were
comparable.
I agree that there is/were a lot of propaganda by of traditional
encyclopedias. Also, Wikipedia has the best *encyclopedic* (and
because of that scientific) principles in comparison to other
encyclopedias (I think that a lot of articles in Britannica wouldn't
pass our NOR, NPOV nor V conditions). (Of course, I don't know
anything about some other, not well known encyclopedias; but according
to Serbian, Croatian etc. encyclopedias, I may say that they have just
a lot more problems then Britannica has.)
But the contents of CZ and WP are not comparable.
Wikipedia wins
in comprehensiveness. And this is "the size trick" of
encyclopedia marketing, as in "20 volumes must be better than 10".
Just look at the Spanish "Enciclopedia universal ilustrada
europeo-americana" (70 volumes, 1908-1930). If the size trick was
useless, this venture would go bancrupt, but they didn't and they
were able to output a 10 volume appendix in 1930-1933. Apparently
they were very successful. But just how scientific were they?
...
In order to be scientific, we must dare to question the need for
being scientific.
It is good to think about successfulness of Wikipedia, but our primary
goal is not to be successful, but to make encyclopedia. And
encyclopedia is a scientific project, like astronomy is a science.
While I don't think anything against trying to make something
different, it is not possible to build encyclopedia outside of
scientific method, like it is not possible to research physical laws
outside of it.
The fact that so much discussion within Wikipedia now
focuses on
verifyability and being scientific, is only explained by the fact
that raw size has already been taken care of. (The Spanish
Enciclopedia universal was 165 million words, a size that the
English Wikipedia database passed in March 2005.) It is not a sign
of scientificality (?) being the most important.
Yes, we started with another phase of building Wikipedia. For a couple
of big projects it is not anymore important how big they are, but how
encyclopedic are they. When you are building community, it is hard to
be strict in using well known principles. (Actually, it very often
goes to not imposing some principles because of community building.)