[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

Sun Oct 3 15:52:52 UTC 2010

On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 09:47, Peter Damian <peter.damian at btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "SlimVirgin" <slimvirgin at gmail.com>
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2010 4:40 PM
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
>
>
>>This is absolutely the attitude I've encountered on Wikipedia, where
>>everyone thinks that if you know how to ask "what is truth?" you're
>>also able to have a go at answering it. But that's the basic error
>>right there, and it has driven off several of the specialists who
>>might have written some good articles on those issues. And it's not
>>only in article space that academic philosophers would be able to help
>>improve things.
>
> That's an answer to question 2 (are there any systematic reasons).  But what
> about question 3?  If there are any underlying or systematic reasons, can
> they easily be
> addressed?
>
> Are there any small changes to the philosophy microclimate that would
> attract the plants back?
>
I can think of a very labour-intensive change -- a project to raise
awareness of the importance of philosophy, and what constitutes a
philosophical issue, and that there are academic sources devoted to
dealing with them. But that's a project that would need academic
philosophers to create it. And it would be a contentious project at
times, because we'd be trying to claim back certain topics from other
hands -- from scientists, for example.

How do we attract the philosophers back once they've gone almost
entirely? I don't know.