
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows a higher-quality internet is possible - kp25
http://qz.com/480741/this-free-online-encyclopedia-has-achieved-what-wikipedia-can-only-dream-of/
======
Strilanc
This article says that the SEP is more comprehensive and more authoritative
than Wikipedia. I agree that it's more authoritative, what with it being
written by authorities in philosophy. But "more comprehensive"...?

Wikipedia is extremely broad. According to the article, the SEP has 1500
entries. Each of those is no doubt better than an individual Wikipedia article
(more cohesive, more in-depth, etc), but I bet there's two orders of magnitude
more Wiki articles on philosophy (nevermind _other_ topics!). It no doubt has
much wider coverage. How's that for "more comprehensive"?

I guess I'm just complaining about stretching a word to mean something more
specific than it usually means. I think of comprehensive as including both in-
depth focus and wide-ranging reach. So when the article counts only one of
those aspects, and omits the other from the checklist, it feels like cherry-
picking the outcome.

~~~
TuringTest
Comprehensive within the field of philosophy? Yeah, I think that can be
achieved. Wikipedia articles on core philosophical articles are often not much
more than stubs - certainly the SEP examples seem more coherent and well
structured. I don't think there will be more than 1500 articles better than
C-class in Wikipedia's Philosophy category.

~~~
_delirium
SEP articles are definitely better-structured, especially the ones on general
overview subjects. I think that's a general property of the respective
authoring models. Wikipedia is good at specific articles on well-defined
subjects, while the general overview articles often range from incomplete to
haphazard. An encyclopedia written by individual expert authors is better at
crafting long overviews, which often require subjective and carefully curated
synthesis of material.

But I use them both, for different things. The general overview articles are
much better at SEP than Wikipedia. But Wikipedia has a lot more narrow
articles, on subjects that SEP doesn't cover at all, or mentions only in
passing in one paragraph of an article. For example, a huge number of short-
to-medium-length biographies of historically important philosophers (SEP
instead has a small number of quite lengthy biographies).

I do wish something like SEP existed in more other fields. I don't know of
anything like it for computer science, for example.

~~~
snogglethorpe
Sometimes I find Wikipedia's "haphazard" articles are actually a _benefit_ ,
because in practice they often seem to end up covering a subject from multiple
angles, with lots of examples etc.

My impression is that in many cases this is because there were multiple major
authors without a master plan for writing the article, so they ended up sort
of putting it all in.

For someone (like me!) who's struggling to grasp a subject, seeing a subject
described from multiple points of views, targeting varying levels of
expertise, can be immensely helpful.

A traditional encyclopedia article, on the other hand, is probably more likely
to be well-structured and comprehensive, but ... I think can be harder to
grasp for someone that's not quite up to the material.

It may be kind of ugly, but the "Just throw it all in!" approach does have
some real merit...

------
beloch
My thesis (physics) intersected with some elements of philosophy in the
context of quantum physics, and I googled (using this verb as an alternative
to "blundered") upon some SEP entries on the subject. They were emphatically
_not_ up to date with what was cutting edge in my field, but what they were
was tremendously well researched and in-depth reviews of the foundations. They
clued me in to some sources that I never would have considered looking at
otherwise, and those sources turned out to be some of the most fascinating
reading material I came across in my research.

Sometimes it's really hard to figure out what you _need_ to read have a good
basis in a new field. If the SEP has pages on it, they're a damned fine place
to start.

------
sytelus
TL;DR: Crowdsourced content systems can have only 2 of the 3: Authorartive,
Comprehensive, Upto date. Systems like Wikipedia and Stackoverflow miss either
one or more of these characteristics. The article claims to have found the
"solution" to this problem which is simply having experts for high level areas
who invite experts for sub-areas to create the content.

I don't know why authors think this is different or novel or scale to
something akin to Wikipedia or Stackoverflow. In a way, the article doesn't
even look honest as it cherry picks examples on SEP that look great and
examples on Wikipedia that look bad to justify its grand claims.

~~~
raldu
Exactly.

The article overall is biased towards authority of some elite "experts" over
more democratic, collaborative, community-driven work.

Sketching SEP as the only hero that saves internet from being an information
junk while calling rest of the internet as, "thrash leap" is just grandiose.
The Internet is full of examples that show "quality" content _is_ possible.
And why is the obsession over "quality" content? The internet is _not_
supposed to be only restricted to use of "information retrieval".

In the article, Wikipedians are called, "non-experts", while there are many
experts in their field who also contribute to Wikipedia. Speaking of which,
why not suggest those "elite" authoritative authors to contribute to
Wikipedia?

It is also claimed that, "The internet should look more like the SEP." What?
The internet is basically an extension to our capabilities of communication.
And how we use it reflects our communication habits. Saying "the internet
should be more like SEP" is like saying everyone should communicate
informative encyclopedia entries to each other in their daily lives. Variety
of other uses of internet, and thus communication, is ignored. The article
fails to recognize the value of "piles of opinion, speculation, and
misinformation", which eventually make up the "quality" content that it
advocates. In fact, as human beings, we are _supposed_ to have all that
"speculation", "opinion", and more importantly, "fun".

~~~
veddox
While I unhesitatingly concede that the article is biased in favour of expert
editors, I think you slightly miss the point with the following remark:

> In the article, Wikipedians are called, "non-experts", while there are many
> experts in their field who also contribute to Wikipedia. Speaking of which,
> why not suggest those "elite" authoritative authors to contribute to
> Wikipedia?

The problem is not that experts don't contribute to Wikipedia. The problem is
that you usually don't know whether or not an expert wrote whatever you are
currently reading. What makes SEP different to Wikipedia is that you know
exactly who wrote the article (it even gives you the author's email address)
and that you know for sure that that person _is_ an expert in his/her field.
That is a guarantee that you simply do not have with Wikipedia and many other
Internet knowledge resources. This is not to say that all information on
Wikipedia is bad, it simply says that you can't have a guarantee.

This, of course, is not only Wikipedia's greatest flaw, it is also its
greatest strength. The Wikipedia model sacrifices authoritativeness in favour
of being up to date and comprehensive (in the sense of covering all subjects).
And that is a valid trade-off for a site that wants to be a knowledge base for
the whole world.

The SEP will never reach the size of Wikipedia, but then again, that is not
its goal. Its aim is to be an authoritative source for academics in the field
of philosophy. Within this well-defined field, it aims to be comprehensive and
up to date. It caters to the needs of scholars, who need something (or rather
somebody, a physical, known author) that they can actually cite in their own
work. Wikipedia can never give that, and neither should it, for then it would
no longer be Wikipedia.

Lastly: although I completely understand your criticism of the all-
encompassing claim that "the Internet should look more like the SEP", I'm sure
most people would agree that it wouldn't hurt to have a few more places around
that you know you can trust for serious information. And incidentally, that is
just what the author is arguing, if you hadn't taken his subheading out of
context ;-)

------
hoopd
> Speaking of holes, the SEP has a rather detailed entry on the topic of
> holes, and it rather nicely illustrates one of Wikipedia’s key shortcomings.
> Holes present a tricky philosophical problem, the SEP entry explains: A hole
> is nothing, but we refer to it as if it were something......If you ask
> Wikipedia for holes it gives you the young-adult novel Holes and the band
> Hole.

This is plain dishonest. Wikipedia has dozens of pages on holes, some of which
are cultural items and the author cherry-picked two in order to make his
point:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holes)

Moreover, the SEP's description of a hole is so arrogant and condescending
it's painful:

> Naive, untutored descriptions of the world treat holes as objects of
> reference, on a par with ordinary material objects....

Spare me.

~~~
yk
Well, "naive" is a term of the trade. So "holes" are a potential problem for
nominalists, philosophers who want to claim that only specific objects - that
chair - exist. Calling a position that is not influenced by the last three
thousand years of meta-physics 'naive' seems to be entirely justified, just as
there are naive accounts of physics and computer science.

~~~
hoopd
How exactly is _naive_ a term of the trade in philosophy? You, and the article
in question, seem to be using it in a way that any grade-schooler would
recognize.

I'm not aware of any "naive accounts" of physics or computer science. You
might be thinking of "naive algorithms" and "naive approaches" but in those
cases the word has a specific meaning which doesn't fit in the context of the
above quote.

~~~
yk
'naive' means unsophisticated, so in a certain way it is compatible with the
meaning a grade-schooler would recognize. However philosophy often is
concerned with the meaning of words and so the naive understanding can define
the boundaries of an acceptable theories.

~~~
hoopd
After re-reading your comments and the intro to the holes article multiple
times I'm only convinced that the SEP has a horrid writing style.

The world has moved on from this type of grandiose intellectualism for a
reason.

------
fsiefken
As I moderate an interfaith discussion group I was looking for a way to better
use the Stanford Encyclopedia offline (printed or as searchable archive) like
wikipedia has and found these tools:

* Create Offprint pages [https://github.com/jgm/sep-offprint](https://github.com/jgm/sep-offprint)

* Latent Semantic Indexing [https://github.com/skywalkermml/LSI_on_SEP/blob/master/proje...](https://github.com/skywalkermml/LSI_on_SEP/blob/master/project_link_and_instructions.pdf)

* Quest for making an ePub [http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183269](http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183269)

* RSS feed generator [https://github.com/21zhouyun/SEOP_RSS](https://github.com/21zhouyun/SEOP_RSS)

* Mobile apps There are an iOS and Android apps, but I'm not sure if they can be used offline

* Reddit SEP bot autolinking relevant articles [https://github.com/AFFogarty/SEP-Bot](https://github.com/AFFogarty/SEP-Bot)

===

Anybody know what happened to the branched Wikipedia projects that were
started because of the editorial quality issue discussion almost 10 years ago
like Citizendium? What others were there? How do they compare with the SEP and
Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Brittanica or the IEP
[http://www.iep.utm.edu/](http://www.iep.utm.edu/) on philosophical topics
now?

------
scythe
Something tells me that the S.E.P. does not draw a much higher proportion of
female contributors than Wikipedia. For one thing, it wasn't mentioned in the
article, and I have the feeling it would've been.

This is important because it tells us that the differences between S.E.P. and
Wikipedia have only to do with subject matter and not procedure. Obviously
trolls aren't interested in philosophy. But philosophy, much like Wikipedia,
has a big problem with outreach to women.

Also, you know what's better than complaining about a lack of Wikipedia
articles about female novelists? Writing one. You know what makes a better
story than an empty complaint? The story about what you were about to reply
what you thought was going to happen: the story about how your article was
rejected by the editors. Of course you're just lazy and avoid effort by
assuming it won't work. If you actually write such an article and see it
deleted you'll have a leg to stand on and people will want to hear you (also,
you can always preserve your hard work in your user-page).

~~~
dalke
You are making an argument from silence. "Of course you're just lazy and avoid
effort by" expressing that feeling and not doing research. The list of authors
for each topic is available at
[http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html](http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html).

Looking at the "A" list, and using gendered assumptions about first names
combined with a few bits of searching: Likely male: 98, Likely female: 16
Unknown: 1. That's ~14% female.

Quoting from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia),
"between approximately 8.5 and 16 percent—of Wikipedia editors are women"

So overall, you are right in that it does not 'draw a much higher proportion
of female contributors than Wikipedia.'

From
[http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan/SWIP/stats.html](http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan/SWIP/stats.html)
(or [http://lemmingsblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/apa-report-
status-o...](http://lemmingsblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/apa-report-status-of-
women-in.html) ) we see that "21% of employed philosophers are women". These
numbers are for the US. A review of some of the authors shows many come from
places other than the US, and some are retired, so this 21% isn't a perfect
reflection of the available author pool.

It does suggest that women are underrepresented compared to the available
author pool. To point out though, the relative under-representation is larger
for Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation is aiming for 25% female
representation.

If S.E.P.'s percentage were 35%, would it be indicative of over-representation
of women as editors? If Wikipedia's were 35%, would it be indicative of under-
representation of women as editors?

~~~
13thLetter
Do we know what percentage of the employed female philosophers would ever be
interested in writing for S.E.P., and what percentage of women in general
would ever be interested in writing for Wikipedia? This is an important
variable for judging whether under-representation is a real issue or not.

~~~
dalke
I don't see how that can meaningfully be determined.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia#Poten...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia#Potential_remedies_for_gender_bias)
has a long section about possible reasons for why females might not be
participating, and ideas for how to improve the situation, with the explicit
belief that higher levels of female participation will lead to a better
Wikipedia.

Thus, is the "percentage of women in general [who] would ever be interested in
writing for Wikipedia" using the current Wikipedia as the baseline, or some
hypothetical best-of-all-possible Wikipedias?

In either case, how do we even go about determining that percentage?

At best this would be a latent variable which depends very much on the model
you have. While important, it may be very hard to determine. (Eg, 'happiness'
is an important variable, but unlike money, it's hard to measure accurately.)

My model in this case is that the editorial population will be similar to the
reader population, but lagging by about 10-20 years.

------
csneeky
Seems like a nice place to read and learn about Philosophy.

Reading it feels more like an old school physical Encyclopedia (e.g., no
hyperlinks or people having discussions publicly about the editing process to
confuse and concern you). Instead it has just what you need from the one
person that knows everything about the thing you are reading about who is the
only person with any business writing about it in the first place.

~~~
danharaj
It's a fantastic place to learn about formal logics and type theories, too.

------
zardo
Scholarpedia is set up in a similar fashion. Each article has a recognized
expert in its field assigned as a currator. It is certainly not comprehensive
though.

[http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page)

------
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005709)
is related.

------
cooper12
> Any errors reflect poorly on the contributors, and someone who spots a slip-
> up can talk to a real person about it—neither of which is true with
> Wikipedia.

Maybe I'm not understanding this statement properly, but Wikipedia has a
history page and uses version control so all content can be blamed to someone.
And there is also a talk page to bring up issues.

~~~
ars
> so all content can be blamed to someone

Do you know how hard it is to track down who authored a particular word in an
article? You literally have to click next, next, next over and over and
manually scan the diff for your change.

A binary search sometimes works, but if there is an intermediate version that
removed and re-added your search term you can fail at that if you get unlucky.

~~~
cooper12
By binary search I'm assuming you mean via the "Revision history search" tool
that can be found in the history page right? Yeah there are a bunch of cases
where it doesn't work so well, especially if the change happened hundreds of
revisions ago, but like you said you can always resort to looking at
individual diffs.

Regardless, someone can be held accountable for the edits, it's just a matter
of having to do more work because of the multi-contributor nature of
Wikipedia. And in 90% of the cases, the offending statement is the last edit
made; people and bots are usually really good at watching pages and recent
changes for vandalism.

------
mjn
It's interesting that philosophy, unlike most other disciplines, has been so
good at this. It's not purely the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, either.
There's another encyclopedia founded at the same time (both 1995), the
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy [1], with a broadly similar mission and
also quite a lot of good articles (though fewer than 1500). And there's an
excellently organized, continually updated bibliography of philosophy papers,
PhilPapers [2]. It's run like the original Yahoo, a big directory with
manually curated topic areas. In computer science, we haven't managed to build
resources like these.

[1] [http://www.iep.utm.edu/home/about/](http://www.iep.utm.edu/home/about/)

[2] [http://philpapers.org/](http://philpapers.org/)

~~~
veddox
As a cynic, I'd say they have nothing else to do ;-)

On a serious note: thumbs up! When are we going to get one in CS or Biology?

------
lobo_tuerto
They could really use a bigger line height on their texts. It's hard to read
with lines close to each other.

Did some tests with the browser dev tools and found that 1.8em instead of
1.4em for the body tag do wonders.

~~~
kijin
Academic journals, at least in philosophy, tend to have fairly small line
heights. Drafts, on the other hand, are almost always double-spaced.

I wonder if this affects the editors' perception of what a good line height
for authoritative documents might be.

------
jkot
> _It now contains nearly 1,500 entries, and changes are made daily._

I tried a few entries, it covers history well, but entries about modern
philosophy are very biased.

~~~
n0us
modern or contemporary? Please explain the bias you find in the articles.
Having majored in philosophy and used this site extensively I don't recall
finding any bias.

~~~
chadzawistowski
SEP does seem to focus much more strongly on analytic philosophy than
continental, although that's arguably a bias of the entire discipline.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo, and Luce Irigaray are all missing, for
instance.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-
Luc_Nancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Nancy)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianni_Vattimo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianni_Vattimo)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray)

~~~
hyperpape
They also don't have Kripke, Putnam or Fodor. I dare say that going by
relative prestige in their philosophical cultures, Kripke is a more startling
omission than any of the three you mentioned
([http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/01/most-
important...](http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/01/most-important-
anglophone-philosophers-1945-2000-the-top-20.html)). That's not a point about
merit, btw, just about who people would write about if personal articles
showed favoritism.

I wonder if there's a tendency to not write articles on living philosophers
(as opposed to some particular aspect of their work).

Still, I do suspect there is less work on 20th century Continental philosophy
(so far as that's a well defined thing).

------
fitzwatermellow
Does the SEP have any sort of bearing on the relative trashiness of the rest
of the internet? Does any individual site have an imperative to influence the
morality of sites it hyperlinks to? Is there some litmus test inbound links
must pass before they can be included? And do digital content producers owe
allegiance to this unwritten set of dicta invisbili? Or is their obligation
solely to economic optimization and a greater global prosperity, where a
rising tide lifts all boats?

Yes. It's true. I've been spending way too much time on SEP ;)

Although I for one would love to see a ClickHole-esque style parody of
plato.stanford.edu. "Knobe lifts the veil executives behaving badly, and you
won't believe what happens next!"

------
pc2g4d
The author seems convinced that the SEP is the best and everything else sucks.
But the SEP has obvious flaws: articles updated at most once every four years,
authors consist only of academics, everything is subject to a central
editorial control.

~~~
jessriedel
Your first complaint ("updated at most once every four years") is fine, except
that it's not that big of a deal for a 3000 year old field. As another
comments stated, topics that are changing rapidly are updated more frequently.

But your second and third complains are about _process_ rather than _result_.
What exactly do you think could be better about the SEP if they had non-
academic authors? Or decentralized control? Not in a hypothetical world where
the editors are evil, but in the real actual world?

I think the answer is "not much, and lots would be worse", because those
properties are key to the SEP's success. This is different than Wikipedia,
which has a much broader mission and would be crippled by these restrictions.

~~~
pc2g4d
Good point---for philosophy, the slow updates aren't a huge issue. But the
article seemed to be holding up the SEP as a model for other endeavors, and
this seems to limit its usefulness in many other areas.

The centralized, academic nature of SEP is fine for them, but it must result
in a sort of elite bias. In my mind, that's a kind of limitation. I actually
prefer the Wikipedia approach or something along those lines, which I do feel
is often effective at capturing various viewpoints.

Ultimately, there exists no one perfect approach to online encyclopedia
compilation. Pros and cons all around.

------
dpkendal
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biograp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography#Oxford_Dictionary_of_National_Biography))
follows a similar model to the SEP to deliver on the
comprehensive/authoritative/up-to-date trifecta. Unfortunately it’s paywalled,
unlike SEP, but it’s certainly the best biographical encyclopedia I know of
because of this.

------
VLM
I have what might be a "free startup idea". Go ahead, run with it.

If you pay a very modest sum (annoying payment system, not smooth as top of
the line systems) to join "the friends of the SEP", you can become a human
drone emulating Amazon's kindle system where you download PDFs by hand for you
to maintain and view by hand on your ebook reader or whatever, and they email
you if an article on your watchlist is later updated so you can pull your new
updated copy (seriously, not a joke). It is a 1980s to 90s era manual labor
workflow.

Someone/something should USEFULLY middleman and publish to amazon kindle for
SEP. Handle aggregation of small articles into texts (the whole thing? or
themes? or by letter?), handle the periodic download and release process,
basically the content provider gives them a copyright release and in trade 90%
or whatever of amazon revenue goes back to SEP. Can it be automated in bulk so
it doesn't have to be done by hand? Probably. Are there sites other than SEP
who could expand into this? Probably.

See thats how to find a startup idea. I looked at downloading pdfs from SEP,
said to myself, "what a manual PITA that needs to be automated away", figured
other people and places could benefit by a little automation...

This idea would never be a billion dollar unicorn, but the general concept of
a "non-technologically obsolete middleman who actually provides real 2010s era
value in the book publishing industry" isn't all that far fetched of an idea
and would probably run a profit.

That could pivot later into "and this is how a REAL 2010s era book publisher
works" perhaps including paper products, who knows. Or other forms of digital
content. Not having the legacy would seem to be a benefit for a new
publisher...

~~~
Erik816
I could be completely wrong about the scope of this project, but that sounds
more like something a Stanford computer science intern could bang out pretty
quickly as a school project and less like an idea for a separate company.

------
xiler
Are there any differences between the models of Scholarpedia and SEP?

------
sciencesama
need some more automatic daily titbits and in the line words

like a wikipedia board

