To sum up a little bit: Perhaps because of some popular caricatures of the subject of philosophy, even those who choose to edit philosophy articles may not appreciate the actual expertise involved in being a trained philosopher. Philosophers, and philosophy in general, are treated with less respect than other academic subjects and experts.
At the same time some topics that in academic philosophy are very complex and the subject of a large volume of scholarly inquiry also appear approachable to lay people. Many are issues that interest or confront lay people at an early age, and the resulting sense of familiarity leads non-experts to assume they understand more than they do. These two factors combined frustrate actual experts, and cause them to abandon the project in despair. That leads to the current state of affairs, where the philosophy related articles are generally of low quality. As for solutions -- we've discarded identifying credentialed experts or privileging expert contributions over others in some systematic manner. Peter has proposed involving Jimmy in a sort of publicity campaign, but even if this succeeds in attracting more experts to Wikipedia it doesn't solve the underlying problems driving experts away. These same issues, by the way, afflict the more popularly known subjects in medicine. The approach of the Medicine Project and its participants has been to keep at it over the course of years, develop a specific reliable source guideline for their field, work together as experts to improve and protect quality content, etc. Perhaps the philosophy experts can learn something from projects with similar problems that have managed them with some success? Of course we reliably burn out physicians and researchers editing in the medicine subject area, so that isn't really a long-term solution either. Nathan _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
