I personally find this roughly “on-topic”.
Philosophy Stack Exchange is kind of a “free knowledge repository” or “free knowledge community”. In some ways, there are parallels or similarities between what it does and what Wikipedia does. I also had exposure to this idea during my time on Codidact.
I personally am really satisfied with our site. Hence, I am somewhat an avid user.
This post is mainly just to communicate that people may want to peruse the Wikimedia Charter, out of purely intellectual interest. I suppose I can also add my own reason for being interested though.
I have actually become somewhat dissatisfied with Wikipedia. Although Stack Exchange and Wikipedia can be seen as different categories of websites, or resources which augment each other, I think Stack Exchange has the potential to compete with Wikipedia, not just reference it or something.
I have had experiences both on Stack Exchange and Wikipedia that have made me more interested in moderation theory.
I recently tried to refactor the talk page of a Wikipedia article, to refine the points being made so it would be easier to get a summary of what points were being made, in relation to the article content. An abridged version of the story is, I was banned from editing Wikipedia for doing this. This was partially due to an escalation between me and a Wikipedia administrator. Ironically, it seems a main reason I was banned, was because I challenged the admin’s right to ban me so peremptorily.
I have read up a little bit on some critiques of Wikipedia. Some people think it doesn’t live up to its stated goal of being “neutral”. Others have claimed Wikipedia has become somewhat bureaucratic, with a complex range of policy rules, and a somewhat restrictive group of administrators.
I do not know if the above is true, and it’s not my desire to claim that it is. I would say where I do take issue is that, as someone who has been pretty keenly fixated on the nature of sound verbal argumentation since maybe 2018 (which is really what led me all the way to my interests now, in formal logic and computational ontologies and such), I find it a somewhat obtrusive feature of Wikipedia’s rules that they are poorly defined.
I personally feel I have deepened my philosophical acuity over the past couple of years (and you are more than welcome to disagree with me). I would never, ever say this to imply that my opinion is a priori categorically superior, but I am under the (debatable) impression that someone’s norms and standards start to shift when one gains fluency in a new skill domain. By that I mean that there are certain reasoning patterns, for example, that maybe a more frustrated early-20s me had a burning yet inarticulable conviction were flawed, but I hadn’t yet developed an internal theory by which I could claim so, and I also didn’t feel any cognitive harmony in believing that the status quo in society didn’t acknowledge that. (I remember for some reason it was especially some of the best-selling books by Steven Pinker that made me very, very interested in “meta-theories” of argumentation, in that I did not want to debate point after point made in his book, but merely wanted a much more efficient, generalized way to point out a categorical issue in argumentative form.)
The idea is that a lot of people maybe have never even heard of what a “confirmation bias” is, and that’s only scratching the surface. I have failed to comprehend what the Duden-Quine hypothesis is about, I still am unclear on what Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is actually saying, and I am unable to assertively define “reason” or “truth”. Obviously, our philosophical forebearers (such as Aristotle and Socrates) would probably like to claim that deepening one’s knowledge or understanding of something is an interesting blend of becoming increasingly uncertain, with shards here and there of enhanced, hyper-focused conviction (arguably).
Wikipedia’s rules are destitutely rhetorical. The recent tendency to cite that information must be “factual” or “neutral” does nothing but reinforce the most influential social groups’ abilities to censure deviant knowledge. The quote from George Orwell, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” shows us how meaningless a word like “equal” can be, without cogent further analysis.
I myself want to create a formal model of Wikipedia’s guidelines, to show more systematically in what ways it may be inconsistent or incomplete. I am really interested in formal ontology systems, especially category-theoretic ones, like those developed by people like David Spivak, Evan Patterson, and Ryan Wiznesky. Short of that happening, I think it could maybe benefit the drafting of a new sort of “world constitution” of the nature of a “neutral” universal information source (the “largest encyclopedia in history”), if more people at least expressed the opinion to some of the participants (I guess, sort of like a delegation…) that it is beneficial to decompose rhetorical terms into as clear, concrete, basic, and unambiguous components as possible, so it is as clear as possible what something is actually saying; if a ruleset is composed in words whose meaning varies from context to context, it opens, to my mind, the issue that people with less self-scrutinizing characteristics are able to wield self-inconsistent arguments to control knowledge. It reminds me of a quote by David Deutsch, who is apparently a Popperian, “People should only trust arguments that are hard to vary.”
So, just because it is a way to learn new ideas that could be applied here, and also because I think people here might have interesting ideas to contribute over there, I just thought I’d share the information that apparently some kind of big re-drafting of Wikipedia policy is “open for discussion” or something until April 30th.
(Can I get a “here, here”?)
