[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

Sat Oct 2 20:11:59 UTC 2010

It explains things quite well.

On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 4:01 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2 October 2010 20:53, Peter Damian <peter.damian at btinternet.com> wrote:
> > From: "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
>
> >> Wikipedia does appear to have fallen into its own folk ontology: an
> >> answer to the question "what is knowledge?" that is simple and obvious
> >> enough for smart high school students. And I'm not meaning to
> >> denigrate smart high school students - but they haven't even had four
> >> years of wrangling with the issue of "how do we know what we know?" at
> >> undergraduate level.
>
> > David could you translate this section here please.  Are you saying that
> the
> > question of what 'knowledge' that the WMF seeks to bring is a difficult
> > question?
>
>
> I didn't say or mean anything about the WMF. As I said, it's an
> evolved folk construction of what knowledge means. And that this is a
> hard question that actually getting really good at typically requires
> four years of someone trying to beat it into the dense brains of
> undergraduates.
>
>
> > Also, be careful not to confuse the content of what is to be
> > known with the medium through which it is acquired.  For example if I
> > explain x in a very simple way that anyone can understand, and if I
> explain
> > x using very technical way, the knowledge x is the same in both cases.
>  It's
> > just that in one case it has explained in an easier way.  We aren't
> talking
> > about different knowledge here.
>
>
> No indeed. That's why I say the question is how to get across to
> idiots that they are, in fact, idiots - without breaking what clearly
> works fantastically well on Wikipedia. (How to avoid, for instance,
> falling into a credentialism death spiral.)
>
>
> - d.
>
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