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Discussion

[edit] Proposed Changes to Atheism Article

Hi, a series of proposed changes to the atheism article and have been outlined at Talk:Atheism#article_.2F_source_discrepancies, comments would be appreciated.

[edit] Interlanguage cooperation in Marxism

Hallo, Science and Philosophy in general, and especially Marxism is a worldwide project without language-borders, or at least it should be. To me it seems that in the field of Marxism, the de.wikipedia and en.wikipedia are the most advanced projects as far as the number of articles, the depth of presentations are concerned. But for single topics, there are also important articles in the Spanish, Portugese, French, Italian, Dutch etc. Wikipedias. Due to a lack of skill in reading and language-comprehension, I don't survey the situation of Marxism in the Russian, Chinese or Japanese Wikipedia.

Now, most articles are written by amateurs or experts on the topics, article by article, without any coordination of the entire development of the encyclopaedia. So although much individual effort is put into the single articles, there is in comparison only few activity de:Wikipedia Diskussion:WikiProjekt Marxismus, and it seems also very few activity here in Wikipedia:WikiProject Philosophy/Marxism.

Further, there is an almost complete lack of exchange between the single projects across language borders. In comparison, a well coordinated project which I could imagine would try to bring each article to the best possible level by comparing articles in the different languages and supply the contents available.

So my question is, how could we organize an exchange of contents between the English and German Wikipedia in the field of Marxism (to start with), and could we extend such an exchange to other languages? Of course this refers a large number of articles (I guess much more than 1 000 articles), an would mean a large amount of work to be done, which on the long run could not be realized by a single person, or only a small group of persons.

-- Schwalker (talk) 14:07, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I suppose one of the first steps in such an undertaking would be to identify articles that are in one wikipedia but not the other, but before that could even be done we would need to know what we ourselves have on the English wikipedia. At the present we have less than three hundred articles tagged as being related to Marxism; I very much doubt that this is a complete list of all English Marxism-related articles. Since September first, only thirteen articles have been added to the Marxism task force, and nine of those have been added by myself --someone who is completely uninterested in Marxism. In short, the interest appears to be lacking. - Pollinosisss (talk) 18:20, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Slightly less than 3000 pages on en.Wikipedia contain the string "marxism", so 300 pages is not bad. To set up an interwiki project, you might find the various embassies useful. Paradoctor (talk) 20:30, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Some lists of de.wikipedia articles in de:Kategorie:Marxismus are on de:Wikipedia:WikiProjekt Marxismus/Artikelliste. Seperated lists for articles on people and things are on de:Benutzer:Rosenkohl/Interwiki-Projekt Marxismus, which shows that there currently are about 1180 articles in this Kategorie:Marxismus.

Problem with en.wikipedia ist that also articles no communist parties and their members are categorized in Category:Marxism. So a CatScan on http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php?wikilang=en&wikifam=.wikipedia.org&basecat=Marxism&basedeep=5&mode=ts&templates=&go=Scan&format=wiki&userlang=e at level 5 gives us 4599 articles, most of which are not directly related to theoretical Marxism. So I'm afraid one has to go through and select those subcategories which beong here.

Greetings --Schwalker (talk) 21:21, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Created Wikipedia:WikiProject Socialism... the Marxism taskforce should be merged...

Into the newly created project about the Socialist movement. --TIAYN (talk) 20:40, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

That would be fine. I think they both should be organized under the social and political philosophy task force. However , it is not crucial that it is. The libertarianism group seems to operate fine outside of WP:PHILO and the anarchism group seems to operate fine within WP:PHILO. Perhaps we could do a better job really focusing in on the philosophical aspects if we kept a separate "marxist (or socialist) thought" group. There are a lot of movements, groups and events which do not lend themselves to the philosophy group in general. This is also true of some anarchism topics too. Perhaps we could split them all out from WP:PHILO to form a separate Social and political philosophy wikiproject with libertarianism, anarchism, socialism, liberalism, fascism set up as task forces of it. I think the assessment data collection might be be more meaningful if we did.

WikiProject Social and political philosophy separated out from WP:PHILO with task forces:

Socialism <== merge ==> Marxism
Libertarianism
Fascism
Anarchism
Liberalism (the content of which is covered by WP:POLITICS in general)
Corporatism (the content of which is not yet organized at all)

Any thoughts? Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 00:10, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't really like the idea of breaking out "Social and political philosophy" into its own project. I wouldn't mind seeing the marxism and anarchism task forces as stand alone projects though. The anarchism task force has a ton of articles that aren't even about philosophy. Pollinosisss (talk) 03:19, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Proposals

I have given it some thought and I have four possible proposals (I support proposal IV):

I. Subsume Libertarianism, Fascism, Socialism/Marxism, and Anarchism into the Social and political philosophy task force of WP:PHILO.

II. Split out the Social and political philosophy task force from WP:PHILO into its own WikiProject and then subsume Libertarianism, Fascism, Socialism/Marxism, and Anarchism into it.

III. Just kick Anarchism and Marxism out of WP:PHILO.

IV. Designate the Social and political philosophy task force for only the most important and general topics in philosophy AND create a separate Social and political philosophy umbrella WikiProject subsuming Libertarianism, Fascism, Socialism/Marxism, and Anarchism. The assessment scheme is the only thing that changes in this proposal. Both the task force and the wikiproject can share the same namespace. The administrative issues remain unchanged. Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 02:33, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm not the member of any task force here under discussion, however a bit puzzled why Socialism and Marxism are seen as closely related that you would have the same task force to care for them. An expert on one of the different non-marxist-models of socialism (e.g. Chuch'e, Baathism, Christian Socialism, ...) would not necessary be interested in Marxism and vice versa. Also I don't recognize what the group of five currents Libertarianism, Fascism, Socialism, Marxism, and Anarchism has in common that a special task force would care for them. There are a lot more currents such as liberalism, conservatism, social democracy etc., and each of the group of five above would perhaps be closer to one of these than to one of the other four in this group. Greetings --Schwalker (talk) 22:41, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Deep Thinking

They're not philosophy as I understand the word, but "diactic" and others I've sent off to AfD are the coinages of a purported philosopher, so somebody here might conceivably be interested. (I don't know of a better place to announce this.) -- Hoary (talk) 01:32, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah, there is a deletion noticeboard for philosophy after all. Though until a few minutes ago it wasn't listed in the expected place. -- Hoary (talk) 13:23, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Philosopher redirects

It's up for discussion. Do you want it? — This, that, and the other (talk) 09:19, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Pageview stats

After a recent request, I added WikiProject Philosophy/Medieval and others to the list of projects to compile monthly pageview stats for. The data is the same used by http://stats.grok.se/en/ but the program is different, and includes the aggregate views from all redirects to each page. The stats are at:

Wikipedia:WikiProject Philosophy/Popular pages.

The page will be updated monthly with new data. The edits aren't marked as bot edits, so they will show up in watchlists. You can view more results, request a new project be added to the list, or request a configuration change for this project using the toolserver tool. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks! Mr.Z-man 00:36, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Philosopher's Summaries

I've just come from the Hume page. I think it would be excellent if in articles about philosophers, the beginning part included one or two key questions that the philosopher was interested in exploring, as an accessible yet intellectual introduction to topic.

At the moment in the Hume example, there are many references to other historical entities, which makes it obscure if you have little knowlege of the background. As questions provoke responses in the reader, it may open up deep and abstract subject matter, and draw people in. --79.78.235.118 (talk) 17:29, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Positive action

Isn't positive action a philosophical term? ~ R.T.G 21:47, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

It may very well be; I'm not sure. May I ask why you ask? Pollinosisss (talk) 22:42, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Seeking helpful input. I should explain, it currently redirects to Affirmative Action (note capitals) with a defintition from Stanfords Dictionary of Philosophy that it "means" (in short) equality law. Of course positive action, action without negative connotations (note no capitals) is a much used phrase in its broader sense. The usual sourcing method, plain old searching the internet, is similarly swamped by the American coin on equality law. It says on Affirmative Action that Positive Action is the term used in the UK but as is evident from the sources, the term used in the UK is "take positive action" not "take Positive Action". That can be explained but would be pointless without possibility of improving the article(no good enough sources found). It's not a big deal but these phrases are often defined crrectly even when they are coined to something else. Perhaps someone here can quote or suggest a text or an online source? It's a common phrase in these waters Britain and Ireland. I don't think there was a time limit for defining it and as the parent of the Affirmative Action approach, will hardly dispute the meaning of that phrase (maybe folk will dispute it I don't even know that). I could have just stuck the project sticker on it but that does not qualify it for attention as it is obviously not a core philosophical topic. ~ R.T.G 03:36, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

That is without mentioning the request for an expert on the article since 18 months and the "unbalanced" tag since 1 year. ~ R.T.G 23:49, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Images

Looking for a free image of Zeno of Elea, I stumbled across this set, some of these images are probably of interest. Paradoctor (talk) 01:24, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I've looked in vain for a picture of Zeno of Elea. The one picture at Wikimedia [1] is definitely an engraving of a bust of Zeno of Citium. Although LIFE identifies this Marcus Meibomius picture as "Zeno of Elea", I strongly suspect that this too, is probably Zeno of Citium. There's a certain irony in the fact that Zeno of Elea is nowadays the more famous of the two Zenos. Until the twentieth century, the opposite was probably true. Singinglemon (talk) 17:59, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I'll let the Aesthetics task force butt heads over that one. ;) Pictures should be up in a few hours. Paradoctor (talk) 19:30, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Here's the proof, BTW, that the Marcus Meibomius image is of Zeno of Citium. Singinglemon (talk) 21:10, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Admit it, you're into dissin' the Eleatics. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 22:43, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Hey it's not my fault that no-one before the twentieth century gave enough of a damn to draw a picture of him. :) I've got absolutely nothin' against the Eleatics. On the other hand, one of my favourite Diogenes of Sinope anecdotes [2] is that when he heard a philosopher one day declaring how there was no such thing as motion, Diogenes simply got up and started walking about. :) Singinglemon (talk) 23:21, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I recall reading a commentator who was pretty indignant about "what Diogenes thought he had achieved by that". ^_^ Paradoctor (talk) 00:19, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Book-class

Since several Wikipedia-Books are Philosophy-related, could this project adopt the book-class? This would really help WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, as the WP PHILO people can oversee books like Epistemology much better than we could as far as merging, deletion, content, and such are concerned. Eventually there probably will be a "Books for discussion" process, so that would be incorporated in the Article Alerts. I'm placing this here rather than on the template page since several taskforces would be concerned.

There's an article in this week Signpost if you aren't familiar with Wikipedia-Books and classes in general. Thanks. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 02:58, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

We already have the Philosophical literature task force. I wonder how they will develop together. Phil lit includes a lot of non-book literature.Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 03:15, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I think you misunderstood, this is for Wikipedia-Books and not for books or other literature. Take a look at Wikipedia:Books/Epistemologyand it should be a bit clearer. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 03:23, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Oh I get it. The Book-class isn't for articles about books, its for "Books" constructed by Wikipedians. I don't see any big problems or big advantages in adopting it, so we might as well... Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 04:53, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Alright, the book-class is a go. I found 24 books more or less related to philosophy (feel free to add additional projects, or remove them from yours as you see fit). You can browse Category:Wikipedia Books to see if I missed any, and create new books (A good way is to use the "book creator" in the print/export toolbox on the left. Click "Create a book" then find a category, and click "Add this category", order things, remove useless stuff, add missing stuff and that's pretty much that, see Help:Books for more details). Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 01:59, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion

Members of this task force may be interested in the deletion effort here.--Epeefleche (talk) 07:57, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Social equality

The current article at Affirmative Action is fully about social equality with various phrases such as "positive action" redirecting there. I have suggested moving to and merging with Social equality which is part of project:Philosophy. It shouldn't require much change to either articles basis so I could do it but please go ahead and chime in at it on Talk:Affirmative_action#Social_equality or Talk:Social_equality#Affirmative_Action ~ R.T.G 08:57, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Attribution problem

I'd like to get input from someone who knows more about the subject in general to take a look at this edit in the Unequal exchange article. Aside from the obvious formatting issue with the attribution, I blanked it simply because I don't know how it could be properly formatted and used. The first obvious question (to me, at least) is, who the heck is "G. Köhler"? An influential author, I hope? Anyway, anyone who has any input on this, feel free to jump in and edit.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 00:50, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

I think we're talking about this senior citizen. I googled, but a look at the References section would probably have worked, too. ^_^ Paradoctor (talk) 01:17, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Note was inserted by user:Jurriaan, left talkback pointing here, might take a week to reply, judging from his edit pattern. Regards, Paradoctor (talk) 01:32, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

The original article was started and written by User:Jurriaan and it was subsequently edited substantially by John Brolin, a Swedish scholar from Lund University who wrote a Phd Thesis on this topic not so long ago. Gernot Köhler is Professor at Sheridan College, Ontario, Canada [3] and he has written a number of papers on unequal exchange. User: Jurriaan 12:25, 6 December 2009 (UTC). I asked Gernot Köhler for some good illustrations of unequal exchange and more references which he provided.

Added a note on the talk page pointing here in case this comes up again. Paradoctor (talk) 12:48, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] KK thesis and KK-principle

I just noticed that these two articles (KK thesis and KK-principle) discuss what appears to be the exact same thing, and neither one actually says much about it. Although I am very interested in the subject, I have neither the epistemological background nor the wiki-editing skills needed to merge the two, or expand either. Both are unrated as to importance (although I assume it would be "Low"), as well. Thought noting it here would be appropriate. Cthuljew (talk) 03:16, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Valuescience

Yesterday I created Magic, Inc. (organization), which promotes a philosophy called Valuescience. I am not a philosopher, so I was puzzled to find something superficially similar in Value Science. I redlinked Valuescience pending finding out whether it is a distinct approach that might someday merit an article - the sources I have indicate it has been taught at Stanford by Magic members for 30 years - and intended to look for sources to tell me whether there is any relationship before putting a hatnote on Value Science and either removing the linkage from Valuescience or adding an informational note on the relationship. However, the Magic article has been listed for deletion, so if anyone can point me to any material on Valuescience or add it to the article I would be grateful; I don't have the background to determine whether it's a notable philosophy and its not being one is listed by the nominator as one of the rationales for considering deletion. Yngvadottir (talk) 13:27, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

The article was kept, so there is now no urgency, but I would still appreciate it (and so would a couple of editors who weighed in at the AfD) if someone knowledgeable could clarify whether Valuescience is related to Value Science. Even though the article was removed from this project, it remains an open issue.Yngvadottir (talk) 23:00, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] FAR for Søren Kierkegaard

I have nominated Søren Kierkegaard for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Arsenikk ^(talk) 22:44, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Opinion

This article badly needs attention and expansion from philosophy types. Jaymax (talk) 02:41, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Population genetics

Do we really think that population genetics is within the scope of the Philosopy project? --Ettrig (talk) 09:07, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

I recently added the entries found in The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia to the philosophy of science task force. Population genetics was one of these entries.

Here's a quote from The Philosophy of Science entry on population genetics:

In general, the problem of finding a balance between a model's being sufficiently complex to describe reality adequately and at the same time being sufficiently simple to allow mathematical analysis is not only a question of philosophical interest, but also a serious one faced in the everyday practice of theoretical biology.

-Pollinosisss (talk) 17:52, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] CFD for Category:Greek philosophy

I have listed Category:Greek philosophy for possible deletion, renaming or whatever at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_December_23#Category:Greek_philosophy. Input from project members would be welcome. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:51, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Unbelieving - dubious article

Unbelieving. A new article with some problems. I have commented on the talk page. -- Brangifer (talk) 17:59, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Recent Changes

Does anyone know whether there is a way of tracking up-to-date changes to all Philosophy related articles, and not just ones on the central themes of philosophy? Orthorhombic (talk) 19:29, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Are you really sure that is useful for you? Currently, we're talking about 13670 pages, minus a few hundred non-article pages. If you still think it's a good idea, say the word, I can do the list in about 15 minutes. Paradoctor (talk) 20:13, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

If you are interested in a particular aspect of philosophy, you could make sure the relevant "index" article is kept up to date and use it's "related changes" link. I, for example, have been keeping the Index of ancient philosophy articles page up to date. This lets me to keep an eye on changes made to the ancient philosophy articles [4]. -Pollinosisss (talk) 20:56, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Hah, I never noticed that one! :) If you want custom watchlists, read Wikipedia:Watchlist#Alternatives_to_watchlists, that should give you everything you want. Paradoctor (talk) 21:23, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

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