[WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

Fri Jun 30 18:38:28 UTC 2006

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Genus:    Priority Inversion
Species:  Pseudo-Consensus Overturning the Big Three (and the Five Pillars)

Case 5.

Article:  Charles Peirce.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Peirce

Section:  Formal perspective
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Peirce#Formal_perspective

Edit:  Revision as of 16:09, 11 June 2006 by Wylie Ali
(-> Formal perspective - deleting long intro. See talk.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Peirce&diff=next&oldid=58049452

The entire contents of the section introduction, the part
between a [==head] and a [===head], was deleted by the
"new user" Wylie Ali (incept date 8 June 2006).

The explanation given on the talk page was as follows:

| ==Removing intro to Formal perspective==
| I am going to remove the whole of the intro to the
| Formal perspective section for these reasons:
|
| It begins with two long (and too long ;-) ) quotations that
| won't be understandable to the audience of generally educated.
| Also, we are writing a secondary source, so it is our job to
| interpret and paraphrase so that the reader doesn't have to
| decode original material.
|
| The rest of it is original research about a "crisis" and the "life cycle"
| of a "symbolist perspective" that is not about Peirce.  Looks like somebody
| has a thesis about symbolism, but they should submit it to a journal;  not
| put it here. It suffers from the same writing problems mentioned above.
| I am not going to copy it here, since you can get it in the history.
| --[[User:Wylie Ali|Wylie Ali]] 16:08, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

This section had quite a long history that had been discussed with previous editors.
It purpose was to place some of Peirce's projects in logic within the context of his
times, partly by comparing one of his important statements about mathematical symbols
with similar statements by George Boole, and other mathematicians of that era who had
emphasized the role of mathematical symbolism.  The rest of the section was written in
response to a reader who had explicily asked editors to make up a concrete illustration
of the very abstract ideas that were being taken up in this section.  At a time when I
still imagined that the newly arrived editors were going to help improve the article,
I had already pointed to this section as one of the "known bugs" in the article that
could stand improvement, both in writing introductions and transitions for the long
quotes from Boole and Peirce, and also in improving the concrete example given.

The help that came was simply a deletion of the whole section.

Jon Awbrey

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:Jon_Awbrey
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