Dispite the ostensibly fluid nature of Wikipedia articles, the goal remains essentially the same as that of other encyclopedias: the systemization and codification of knowledge.

The 18th Century Encyclopedists were part of Jimbo's beloved "Enlightenment," and were deployed to stifle what remained of the Renaissance. The Renaissance, with its Idea of Progress, was considered to be highly disruptive by the European oligarchy. It was engendering all sorts of undesirable social change. The Encyclopedists, by purporting to encapsulate all known knowledge of any real importance, conveniently set out to put a stop to the origination of new knowledge.

So, could it be that encyclopedias are an inherently feudal concept? If so, could anything be more detrimental to humanity?

No, they're not. When I was growing up I had Brittanica on disk and it was damn useful. And Wikipedia is even moreso. Say what you like about it being unreliable, I won't disagree, but I've personally found it to be invaluable over the past few years for getting information about albums, TV shows, movies, and the occasional overview of science topics. I know people here bitch and whine about how awful the place is but 95% of it is useful information, however badly written and poorly presented it may be. Flawed, but not evil.

At one time I thought Wikipedia could be of high value by organizing knowledge. But no, my proposals about putting Wikipedia articles into some meaningful organization was soundly rejected.

To be honest, when I was younger I found encyclopedias a bit basic and felt they talked down to the reader. I don't know if that was a kiddies' encyclopedia I was reading or what But I don't feel like that about Wikipedia articles.

I launched this thread in the "Meta" forum because I am hoping to get at questions of epistemology, rather than practical uses. It is often the case that something which has an obvious benefit has a more significant, though less obvious, damaging effect.

As an example, consider the fact that authoritarian, police-state governments are good at reducing the crime rate, which is why, initially, some people might welcome them. The bad effects become apparent over time.

A different example: "googling" is very fast and convenient, but in the long term, highly destructive of a person's ability to do actual research.

Before launching into a serious discussion of Epistemology (and I am more than prepared to do that, if people can stand the bloody pedantry of it all), it's useful to enjoy this cautionary tale from Philosopher/Logician Raymond Smullyan...

That was absolutely delightful . Sort of an epistemological My Dinner With Andre. Wish they tought dry philosophy classes like that!




Many of the BLP parts are evil. But on the whole, however, I agree with your utilitarian assessment.

No, a good encyclopedia article is merely a good university introduction to X course, sort of like the OpenCulture iPOD-casts, but in page form. WP's basic problem lies elsewhere: to wit, they don't have a professor to give the course!

Imagine you send a bunch of bright but ignorant 18 year olds into a library of primary medical literature books and bound journals, to write a term paper on AIDS, or into a history library to do one on The French Revolution. To make this interesting, you have removed all the encyclopedias. You've left in the review papers, because you know there are thousands of them, and they're scattered to hell and back. Also, some of them aren't very good, and most are badly biased in favor of whatever aspect the writer had just finished researching in the process of writing a grant proposal.

Now, what is the result? Without anything to hang it on, you get some really funny and biased papers. They aren't exactly wrong, but they have very little balance. A professor giving a course on AIDS could have done a much better job just sitting there doing an article of the top of his/her head.

Wikipedia doesn't really have any mechanism to fix this. Somewhere, at some level, in order to start on an article on anything, you really have to have somebody who knows the subject and has some common sense and a sense of proportion. I can hear Wikipedians saying now: "But we don't forbid such people to write articles or edit them!" Answer: no, but you don't give them any special authority, either. They aren't recocognized. There's no professor standing in front of a classroom, giving a course, by which you know who is the professor and who the students. The formal experts, who have the decent and balanced overview might be present, but they are just one among many, in a crowd. And they're not even wearing a tie. The crowd, without reading facial or body or age clues, is suposed to recognize (finally) that one is among them who is an actual subject-matter expert, without any claim to, or checking of, credentials. This may take a long time (maybe forever-- see the articles on Global Warming) and it usually winds up being a little like What's My Line. "User:LaserOptiksDude, is the sort of stuff you work on experimentally usually larger than a breadbox? Might I get an interferrence pattern from it? I take it that light is involved in some way?"

I've been trying to explain all this to Lar, who seems to think it's a straightforward matter to simply parcel out a subject according to the various subareas of it which interest the academic community,and then give each one treatment according to the measure of belief which the academics have in seeing the subject in just that way. Hmmm, and who's going to do this? No identified experts are needed AS SUCH, I'm told. Or, if we happen to have an expert passing through, it will be obvious instantly who he/she is, without any arguing, or pissing matches.

Well, I've participated in creation of a lot of WP articles, and that idea is just flatly, experientially, wrong. And that's a problem with Wikipedia.

Milt

Obviously, students need direction, but traditionally this comes from professors, not encyclopedæ. The use of encyclopedæ to direct research efforts (which I'm certain is common practice) will tend to result in unoriginal, cookie-cutter scholarship.

encyclopedias feudal? Do you have any idea about why encyclopedias were developed in the first place?

Encyclopedias were intended to be completely subversive.

Imagine a world in which everything that you think is controlled by the Church, and so everything is judged through that filter.

What encyclopedias tried to do from the beginning is to level the playing field. In other words, an article about a saint could be along side an article about a famous courtesan. And there would be no distinction made as to their relative importance.

This is why an exclusionary outlook goes against the ideals of what an encyclopedia should be, which is a means of destroying artificial boundaries of knowledge.

If there weren't issues about child welfare involved, I would be 100% for the inclusion of the infamous "Cleveland Steamer" article...and would be against any and all deletions....since an encyclopedia, by definition, is not supposed to make any judgments as to importance, relative or otherwise....

To say that the "Enlightenment" was a means of stifling the Renaissance is to misunderstand the historical context. The "Enlightenment" comes directly out of Renaissance thought and the proof of that is that Louis the XIV, who was allergic to the Renaissance on any number of levels (have a look at Versailles to see what he was into...), was not exactly a huge fan of the Encyclopedists.

If you liked that one, you might like this one even more...

I disagree. As an example, take "Candide," which pits the boundless cynicism of Voltaire against the boundless optimism of Leibniz.

Well, the Renaissance is the celebration of man and the old non-Roman Catholic traditions of knowledge. it took a while to get going (heh) and it was closed by the double bangs of Newton and first big-gun blast of science as world system, and by the end of the reformation, which finally took out the Catholics once and for all as the be-all and end-all authorities on knowledge in the West.

The "enlightenment," fast-forward half a century, is just the logical outcome to that arc Not only don't we need Catholic priests, we might not need any kind of clerics. Science can be learned by anybody (Voltaire was a big interpreter of Newton), and so can anything else. The encyclopedia was just an extension of the Wycliff bibles and so on, for the masses. All of these, tweaks at authority all the way.

Votaire tilted at too many windmills in his life to be a true cynic. He was an idealist, like any encyclopedist. He simply hated any authority not based on superior knowledge. As have intelligent people in all ages, from Socrates to Einstein.

Man will finally be free when we strangle the last king in the entrails of the last priest, said Diderot. The first priest being the first conman, who'd met his first fool, added Voltaire.

Your version of history is inaccurate. For example, a key personality in the Renaissance was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, the founder of modern science. The Council of Florence was a key event in the Renaissance. So, your anti-Catholic "spin" has no basis in fact. I do agree that Newton played a big role in ending the Renaissance, but his "big-gun blast" was aimed squarely at the scientific method itself (remember hypotheses non fingo?)

As far as the Enlightenment is concerned, the encyclopedists were were establishing authority, not flouting it. They were promoting a system of "politically correct" knowledge. What was eliminated was metaphysics, a term which has lately been bastardized into the equivalent of "New Age" foolishness, but which is actually the study of causes and universals. Newton claimed that it wasn't necessary to know the "why," only the "what." He managed not only to plagiarize Kepler, but to neuter his ideas.

You may be interested in my article on the Continuity thesis, the hypothesis that there was no radical discontinuity between the intellectual development of the Middle Ages beginning in the twelfth century and the developments in the Renaissance and early modern period, and that the idea of an intellectual or scientific revolution following the Renaissance is a myth.

The thesis originated with Pierre Duhem, but received strong recent support from James Franklin, who is discussed in the article.

The punchline of this being Franklin's comparison of the 15th century invention of printing to television, which produced "a flood of drivel catering to the lowest common denominator of the paying public, plus a quantity of propaganda paid for by the sponsors".
Franklin was just a little too early for the internet but he might have said the same of that. I wonder what he thinks of Wikipedia?

There was a political revolution, beginning with the foundation of the first nation states by Louis XI and Henry VII. These monarchs made an alliance with the commoners against the nobility, and began a policy of educating the commoners, which enormously strengthened France and England, economically, militarily and otherwise. This ended the feudal policy of fixed social relations.

The ideas which led to the Renaissance were certainly present in the Middle Ages, kept alive by teaching orders such as the Brotherhood of the Common Life.

Yikes! That is, shall we say, an extreme minority view. Natural science in the modern sense is characterised by the scientific method, which in turn is observational, mathematical (not numerological), and statistically testable. Cusa had none of these things, though he did have an admirable non-Earth-centric view which puts him in line of grand tradition (albeit one that goes back to Aristarchus of Samos-- it doesn't just start off with Nicholas). For me, modern science begins with the idea that the language of God is mathematics, and that is due to Galileo (and perhaps his father). Dynamical mathematics in physics starts in about 1600. That's algebra as opposed to geometry.

Eh, what? The Council of Florence is just a bunch of Catholic administrators trying to get some power away from the pope. It's internal Church politics and has nothing to do with the idea that you don't have an enlightenment (religious or scientific) without first a reformation and getting out from under the thumb of Catholicism. Can the Council of Florence be seen as the beginning of the reformation? If you like. Or not. The Catholics had been having schisms, popes and anti-popes for centuries. Some political church bruhaha had to preceed the days of Martin Luther and German political independence from the church (without which desire, Luther would have been toast). Pick one. Personally, I think the Roman Catholic church was in trouble the moment the movable cast-type printing press was invented ca. 1450, and that Guttenburg was ultimately responsible for both reformation AND scientific enlightenment.

There is no full scientific method at that point to aim at! One cannot expect poor Newton to understand the modern scientific method as we know it, completely in 1713 or whatever-- it being still under the process of invention (partly by himself). Newton at this point is still participating in it, and too closely to be able to stand away from it. Frankly, he reminds me of Ayn Rand here-- he has entirely too much confidence in his powers of reason, and doesn't know the pitfalls of induction, nor realize that because of the uncertainty of induction, hypotheses of some type are always thus inescapable. But that's okay--he's easy to forgive (easier than Rand).

A lot depends on what you mean by "authority." Any encyclopedia tries to be authoritative in one sense.

Newton is pre-enlightenment, very metaphysical and theistic, and he's not monolithic. He can at one moment pretend that his methods are pure because he's been caught with his pants down and can't explain (say) gravity. But that's narcissism. Newton wasn't above drawing on metaphysics when it came to "whys"-- for example his explaination of absolute time and absolute space in the Principia is that God is omnipresent and omniexistent, and thus guarantees both time and extension everywhere in the universe . And like Leibniz, Newton wrote a lot of bad theology, which (unlike Leibnitz) he had the good sense to keep unpublished. The kind of thinking Newton pretended to, occasionally, didn't actually enter into science until the French materialists-- and that WAS the "enlightenment". But the metaphysical is nearly impossible to expunge from science, and as late as 1905 we have Einstein trying to do it (while attacking Newton's time and space), and then relenting 20 years later before Heisenberg, who really wanted a science of observables-only (which Einstein said was the kind of thinking he'd once played with, but that was nonsense all the same). At present, the jury is out on the matter of what happens when nobody looks. But nobody in the englightenment attacked hypotheses in the nonthesistic (but surely metaphysical) sense. By then, they were just getting used to statistics. Laplace told Napoleon he had no need for the hypothesis of God, but he didn't mean he had no need for any hypotheses at all!

As for Newton plagarizing Kepler, I have no idea what you mean. Newton credits Kepler in the Principia. Kepler was a geometer, not a mathematician (as Newton and Galileo were), and besides his correct laws he had a lot of incorrect geometrical nonsense involving Platonic solids and astrology. There was nothing to plagarize. Newton, who with people like Descartes was one of the founders of analytical geometry, as well as (with Galileo) of mathematical kinematics and kinetics, merely explains Kepler in analytical mathematical terms. Newton does give Kepler credit for his three (more or less geometrical) laws of planetary motion, but Newton shows how Kepler's planetary laws (and many other laws of motion) can be deduced from three much simpler laws of motion (of which one is due to Galileo), plus a law of gravity. Newton fully earned the place we give him traditionally.

...just like the Magna Carta had nothing to do with the rights of commoners, being a revolt of some high-level nobles against the king.

However, at least one possible way of viewing the trends of history over the last thousand years has been a long, cascading series of revolts against centralized power of church, state, and other institutions, which started with minor and easily-dismissed internal struggles of high, powerful people against even higher and even more powerful ones, but gradually (and sometimes against the beliefs of the people who started the earliest such rebellions and never wanted them to go further) extending to the point where more and more people got in on rebelling against whoever was exerting power against them from loftier places.

Where religion was concerned, first you had power struggles against the pope within Catholicism, then you had reformation splitting off entire churches and denominations from it, then you had separation of church and state where even outright atheists had rights.

Where government was concerned, first you had some power sharing from the monarch to other aristocracy, then you had limited franchise from some parts of the general public (like white, male property owners), then the vote expanded to other groups until by the mid 20th century you had a full-fledged civil rights movement for discriminated-against minorities.

Oh, I cannot disagree. I only suggest that this kind of thing is a subtheme of all history that we know! People fighting for empire and unification. After which little bits fight for indpendence. There's no particular reason to start the clock running in 1415 or whatever, even religion-wise. Before that there were wars within the church that I alluded to (different papal claims) and before that it was all those ecumentical councils I can't keep track of, and all the shisms you can read about in The Eastern Orthodox Church, which are truly, ah, Byzantine. And before Rome there was Greece and before Greece there were little Greek states, and so on.

Are you going to argue that there's one time, after which we've been moving toward more individual freedom on Earth, but before which, we were making no headway and things were getting worse?

Careful, now. There's no worse despotism than your little clan you can't get away from, and in which laws are enforced arbitrarily, by the local currupt warlord. That's like Wikipedia. Enough of that, and you'll be praying to your local Gods for some version of the Corpus Juris Civilis, which gives you (at least as a Roman Citizen) some basic human rights regarding due process. No, that wasn't invented by Magna Carta.

The jury may be out, but this juror came in a long time ago. Perhaps one has to have been a student of Systems Theory and System Modeling to resolve the issue, but it occurs to me that anyone can appreciate that the Model is not the System, just as the Map is not the Territory and the Photograph is not the Scene. A Magritte painting of a pipe is not a pipe. The whole point of looking is to update the looker's model.


As a student of Semiotics, I can appreciate the joys of the Gematria, but only for the intellectual and recreational value of digging into secondary and tertiary meanings of cultural signs and symbols. It hardly seems like a scientific way to apprehend astronomy. As near as I can tell, Gallileo still gets credit for conducting earthbound experiments to understand gravitational motion, and carefully observing the motion of the moons of Jupiter to assess the gravitational dynamics of heavenly bodies.

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe"

We all live in our own little realities. No, I think science has moved on from whether things continue to happen if nobody looks (after all, they happened before life began on Earth, or before any brains evolved). The question is now down to whether or not things are truely deterministic, as even chaos is, or whether things go at the roll of the dice. And if the quantum dice go this way, does that mean in some other universe they go the other way.



Yeah, that's not science. Good guessing, though.


Yes, he gets credit for discovering d = k t^2 in uniformly accelerated systems, as in falls. As for the dynamics of Jupiter, there's nothing to see except that everybody goes around with its own different period. Galileo inferred this was how the solar system as a whole worked. Good. Had Galileo thought to relate the periods of Jupiter's four major moons with the distances, he'd have reproduced Kepler's laws for the planets: P^2 = k R^3 Square of the period is proportional to cube of semimajor axis. He could have actually done this, but he didn't think to. That got left up to Kepler, who gets full marks (though Kepler didn't do it for Jupiter-- he couldn't since he never used a astronomical telescope!). Kepler's is a really good algebraic physics dynamic equation-- one of the first, ever. So it's not quite true that Kepler did no proportions as we know them. But he discovered a relationship which Newton's genius reduced to a one of many results of several far more fundamental relationships, which predicted everything from the motions of planets to moons to comets to apples falling and balls rolling. All with the same few laws.

Religion has always been a double-edged sword. It can be a liberating force (consider the political implications of what Jesus actually taught!) or, when controlled by the oligarchy, a means of restricting knowledge and regimenting thought. There were the teaching orders, on the one hand, and on the other, orders like the Jesuits who from time to time resembled the National Secuity Agency or worse.

Hmm what about the Jesuit mathematicians, logicians and philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? The orthodox view of the scientific revolution as a happy convergence of the work of Newton, Galileo and Bacon, mostly rooted in the English Protestant tradition is merely a neat story. It ignores the fact that Newton's model of mathematical-experimental science had antecedents in the work of Catholic mathematicians and natural philosophers, and it also ignores the framework of learning provided by the large network of hundreds of Jesuit colleges and universities, where all this flourished.

More generally, what it also ignores is that the whole scientific development of the seventeenth century would have been impossible without the 'rediscovery' of ancient classical learning, and this would have been impossible if that learning had not survived. And it survived only in the work of the copyists and scribes, based in centres of religious study in various parts of Europe during the period 500-1100. Let us not forget the debt we owe to these people.

Andy DiSessa credits this to Galileo. Indeed one can find a rigorous derivation of the equations of motion for constant acceleration in Galileo's notebooks. (As far as I know, these notebook pages are not yet reproduced online.*) However, there was an earlier mathematician, Domingo de Soto, who had similar results before Galileo. (Note that the description of Fray Domingo de Soto as a "virtuoso calculator" suggests he may have been gifted with Asperger's Syndrome.)


Did Galileo have a way to estimate the radius of the orbits of the moons of Jupiter?

* Andy diSessa reproduces the contents of Galileo's notes on page 13 of Changing Minds...

Yes, from time to time the Jesuits, like other orders, were helpful and productive. Religion has been a double-edged sword, and therefore to categorize it as either good or bad is misleading.

And as is so often the case with the orthodox [read:Wikipedian] view, it is false.

Algebra and Algorithms come to us from the Arab Mathematicians.

Archimedes also had the foundations of Calculus, too.

Even worse than encyclopedias are school textbooks, like science and history textbooks. Those are even more evil. The only goal of the writers of school textbooks is to stop the origination of new knowledge, the bastards.

I'll pass over what your unconscious might have meant by "dispite" and merely point out that the catch remains what it's always been:

IF Wikipedia were intended by its principals to function primarily as an encyclopedia,

THEN its overriding objective might be "the systemization and codification of knowledge".

Now it's true that the Un-Washed Un-Principals of Wikiplebia are constantly thumping their Bible, to wit, or not, How To Succeed In The Knowledge Biz Without Hardly Trying, but I syncerely doubt if the proverbial Bible salesman really buys that line.

Jon

A variation on this theme has just been sounded on the CPOV List.

Borrowing Joseph Reagle's titling of a “Universal Encyclopedic Vision” (UEV), I detached the more abiding pursuit from the scent of an all-too-familiar albatross and retitled the beastly questying thus:

Universal Encyclopedic Vision : E-lightenment & Bee-nightenment

Jon

An incidental comment …

Sorry, that's a completely looking-glass view of history. Encyclopedists sought to lay out what was currently known for two reasons. First was to educate people. Second was to reveal where there were gaps in existing knowledge. The newly educated people could then seek to fill these gaps. Thus encyclopedias did more than anything to originate new knowledge.

I admit that I thought HK's thesis was a little wacked when I first read it, but that was a couple of years ago, and I've had some time to reflect, not only on the subtler implications of the charge but on all the ways that the best intentions of encyclopedic projects can drag us to hell, as Wikipedia appears bound and determined to show us.

And I eventually realized that HK's suspicion of Jimbo & Larry & Co.'s e-lightenment echoes some familiar themes from the late, great, post-modern critiques of the Enlightenment.

So I think it's worth probing a little deeper — and asking ourselves, “Where exactly is the cloven hoof in these oh-so-bright-seeming unicornucopiæ?”

Jon Awbrey

Neither of you adequately capture the utter radicalism of Diderot. His great encyclopedia bore no resemblance to your Wikipedia or Britannica. You had fantastic, strikingly original essays from men like Rousseau and Voltaire (it's always interesting when two such legendary opponents are brought together into the same publication). The Encyclopedia challenged orthodoxy, and it is certainly part of the path to the French Revolution.

This was no reactionary effort to put together facts and stop the progress of history and neither was it just a way to educate people. It was the triumph of reason (yes, there is a reason that we call it the Age of Reason) and pointed the way to the future in science, philosophy, opinion, and society. It was forward-looking in contrast to the Wikipedia project which is inherently and utterly backward-looking.

Oddly enough, Ottava was suggesting to me that there was nothing wrong with paraphrasing* in that academia was built on people paraphrasing* 90% of their work. Sympathetic as I am to the idea that academic work does depend on regurgitating the works of others, it does depend on adding the 10% of inspiration or perspiration for it to be considered useful. It is the difference between the symbiotic relationship of academics challenging each other and moving forwards, and being a parasite. It is also, of course, somewhat misleading to dress Wikipedia up as an academic exercise in the first place, but that is another matter.

[*Edit: Ottava is sulking that I used the word "plagiarism" rather than "paraphrasing". Given that he is having a big sulk about it, I've edited the offending phrase to properly reflect his offline comment. It makes no difference as to the sense of what I've said]

We see the rise of social media and free culture most clearly acts as a barrier to the forward march of knowledge and truth in the area of journalism. The culture and economics of social media favors the endless aggregation and repackaging of information over the work of journalism which requires costly and labor intensive investigation and truth gathering. The treatment of content as economically marginal while the medium and distribution become the holders of economic value destroys the basis for investigation and news gathering. The result is the folding of newspapers and reduction of news gathering resources in almost all media, print, broadcast and digital. What replaces it, whether the Huffington Post or Druge Report, might possess a rich diversity of opinion but over time it will grind to a halt from the absence of re-vitalizing factual reportage.

It seems like that an online "encyclopedia" or any learning community that values the aggregation of information over the creation of knowledge will work in a similar manner. Then research in the arts and sciences will suffer the same fate as investigation and news gathering has in journalism. Fortunately Universities and research institutions are not as much of low hanging fruit as the already economically distressed print media. But in the end it might make little difference, especially if social media dominates in the market place and culture over an extended period of time. If this happens it won't matter if the "encyclopedia" is the child of the radicalism of Diderot or Mr. Wales' low-brow "Objectivism."

Yes. We are all in the grip or a terrible micropayment problem, where it's impossible to charge directly for small amounts for small bits of information, and thus crappy-but-free information drives out correct-but-expensive information. There being no middle ground of cheap-and-pretty-good information, and no way to produce it.

Thus, Newsweek's paper circulation is down 50% and they're hemorrhaging money, since paper circulation is where they make their money-- the micropayment problem keeping them from making it on-line (AdSense is not enough). The result is that the journalism Newsweek supports is THAT far from being dismantled. It will not be long before there is no journalism as we know it left, because nobody has figured out how to make people who access it on-line PAY FOR IT.

And it's not just news. It's science, technology, biotech, medicine, you name it. All are in the same on-line squeeze from which there is no present escape. The people who cannot package information with a physical product that people are forced to spend money for, are simply doing to go belly-up, per Gresham's Law of the Jungle. And some of THEM have no replacements in our society. When they go, we're all in deep, deep, do-do.

Many good comments here about balancing the value of distilling, summarizing, and packaging existing information gathered from scattered and diverse sources and then adding that extra 10% of fresh analysis and insight that moves our collective understanding forward a significant notch.

That's what I'd like to see demonstrated in NetKnowledge -- a learning community that balances both of those worthwhile objectives.

I'd also like to see one more thing. I'd like to see articles of an encyclopedic nature repackaged in the form of entertaining stories, suitable for children and/or adult audiences, to bridge the gap between didactic presentation of information and the manifest hunger for more artistic presentations.

I quite agree with you John, as far as that goes. But the point was about Encyclopedists in general. Few if any of Diderot's successors came anywhere near his radicalism. Maybe the most interesting was the 1911 Britannica, with contributors ranging from T. H. Huxley to William Michael Rossetti (brother of D. G. and Christina Rossetti).

Continuing discussion on the CPOV List —