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"...?<p>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 <i>other</i> topics!). It no doubt has much wider coverage. How's that for "more comprehensive"?<p>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.
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 <i>not</i> 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.<p>Sometimes it's really hard to figure out what you <i>need</i> 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.
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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>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: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holes" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holes</a><p>Moreover, the SEP's description of a hole is so arrogant and condescending it's painful:<p>> Naive, untutored descriptions of the world treat holes as objects of reference, on a par with ordinary material objects....<p>Spare me.
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:<p>* Create Offprint pages
<a href="https://github.com/jgm/sep-offprint" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jgm/sep-offprint</a><p>* Latent Semantic Indexing
<a href="https://github.com/skywalkermml/LSI_on_SEP/blob/master/project_link_and_instructions.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/skywalkermml/LSI_on_SEP/blob/master/proje...</a><p>* Quest for making an ePub
<a href="http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183269" rel="nofollow">http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183269</a><p>* RSS feed generator
<a href="https://github.com/21zhouyun/SEOP_RSS" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/21zhouyun/SEOP_RSS</a><p>* Mobile apps
There are an iOS and Android apps, but I'm not sure if they can be used offline<p>* Reddit SEP bot autolinking relevant articles
<a href="https://github.com/AFFogarty/SEP-Bot" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/AFFogarty/SEP-Bot</a><p>===<p>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 <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://www.iep.utm.edu/</a> on philosophical topics now?
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.<p>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.<p>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).
Seems like a nice place to read and learn about Philosophy.<p>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.
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.<p><a href="http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005709" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005709</a> is related.
> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/home/about/" rel="nofollow">http://www.iep.utm.edu/home/about/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://philpapers.org/" rel="nofollow">http://philpapers.org/</a>
They could really use a bigger line height on their texts. It's hard to read with lines close to each other.<p>Did some tests with the browser dev tools and found that 1.8em instead of 1.4em for the body tag do wonders.
> <i>It now contains nearly 1,500 entries, and changes are made daily.</i><p>I tried a few entries, it covers history well, but entries about modern philosophy are very biased.
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?<p>Yes. It's true. I've been spending way too much time on SEP ;)<p>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!"
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.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography#Oxford_Dictionary_of_National_Biography" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biograp...</a>) 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.
I have what might be a "free startup idea". Go ahead, run with it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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...<p>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.<p>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...