{"id":554,"date":"2008-08-28T13:54:25","date_gmt":"2008-08-28T13:54:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=554"},"modified":"2008-08-28T13:54:25","modified_gmt":"2008-08-28T13:54:25","slug":"fun-with-wikipedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2008\/08\/28\/fun-with-wikipedia\/","title":{"rendered":"Fun with Wikipedia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I mentioned a while ago that I was thinking of rewriting the Wikipedia page on the History of Physics from scratch.\u00a0 And I did.<\/a> (Archived copy here<\/a>, in case you’re reading this post from this blog’s archives).\u00a0 Now, there are a lot of complaints to be made about Wikipedia articles.\u00a0 In the history of science, they can be almost painfully Whiggish.\u00a0 In this case, I felt justified because the prior version of the History of Physics article<\/a> was not only methodologically suspect, but, really, more or less unreadable, and it was clear that piecemeal amendment would not be a useful path and that no one else was going to undertake the project.<\/p>\n

So, if an academically-trained historian is going to just swoop in and do this kind of thing, what ought to be taken into account? I feel Wikipedia is an opportunity not only to correct inadequate views, but to create a resource that can serve as both a primer on a topic, as well as a guide to various levels of literature (popular, scholarly overview, detailed scholarly work, etc…).\u00a0 This can be done, I think, with judicious use of documentation.<\/p>\n

I don’t think my take on the history of physics required many references by academic standards, but the Wikipedians can be persnickety about this kind of thing.\u00a0 The Master of Physics Articles on Wikipedia, known as “Headbomb”, reverted my edit earlier this month, because I hadn’t yet put in new documentation and pictures.\u00a0 That’s fixed.\u00a0 I now have used the “Further Reading” section to suggest some general overviews for interested readers, while the “References” section basically serves as a “books about this particular topic” guide rather than as a “this interpretation was first suggested by” list.\u00a0 On this score, by the way, there’s plenty of room for alteration and improvement, so have at ye, if you like.<\/p>\n

Content-wise, I chopped everything prior to Galileo, and put in references to the “history of classical mechanics”, “history of optics”, “history of astronomy”, and “Aristotelian physics” articles; using the argument about the collapsing of the barrier between technical and philosophical subjects in the early 17th century as justification (and cited Dear’s “Discipline and Experience” here, but if there’s a more appropriate reference…).<\/p>\n

A lot of Wikipedia contributors tend to have a methodology that defines, say, “physics” to include information included in such-and-such criteria, and then including everything back to prehistory matching or deemed to match those criteria as a “contribution” or “precedent”.\u00a0 This is particularly a problem in dealing with the enthusiasts of Islamic science.\u00a0 I’m hazy on what distinctions Islamic scholars drew (as opposed to Scholastics) between philosophy and geometric sciences, but, it seems to me, that their work can definitely be fit in the optics\/mechanics\/astronomy categories, and would be inappropriate to fit into the “physics” category, the modern version of which was clearly constructed over the course of the 17th and 18th (and really, 19th) centuries.\u00a0 There’s also an “Islamic science” article, where someone with expertise ought to clarify what categories of knowledge were specific to that scholarly culture.<\/p>\n

There’s also a question about what tone one should strike.\u00a0 I tried to keep the article scholarly but reasonably accessible (which is pretty much what the physics articles do), with references to other articles on most unexplained topics.\u00a0 These topics are frequently poorly written (“Aristotelian physics” basically reads “here are a bunch of crazy ideas that are wrong and here are people who introduced the modern ideas”–the page dedicated to Aristotle’s book, Physics<\/em>, is a bit better).\u00a0 But there’s nothing to be done about this without undertaking some sort of systematic campaign.\u00a0 My revision is also not a completely satisfying scholarly rendering.\u00a0 Specifically, I feel there ought to be a section on “Natural Philosophy” to put my discussion of early experimental and theoretical work in a better intellectual context; as well as extended information in my last section on the “Physical Sciences”.<\/p>\n

Finally, it will be interesting to check back and see if this new article serves as a scaffold for further contributions, or if it will descend back into the morass of unreadable, disconnected, decontextualized list of “contributions” that it previously was.\u00a0 In the meantime, if you feel like it, have a look, criticize, amend, etc, and feel free to open up any discussion on how these matters should be dealt with in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned a while ago that I was thinking of rewriting the Wikipedia page on the History of Physics from scratch.\u00a0 And I did. (Archived copy here, in case you’re reading this post from this blog’s archives).\u00a0 Now, there are a lot of complaints to be made about Wikipedia articles.\u00a0 In the history of science,<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Fun with Wikipedia<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[630,1499],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history-of-physics","tag-wikipedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}