And let's not forget the "Big Cleanup" of Wikipedia articles. This was precisely meant to allow us to start on new and better grounds instead of having to patch someone else's work. But I do like to idea of a "historical repository" where old encyclopedias could be consulted and linked to current CZ articles. There are however much more urgent needs for the moment.
Laurent Brun On 4/3/07, Andrew Skolnick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My two cents: It's more like *all *of the articles from such old reference works are outdated. It's not just the information they contain. It's how the information is organized. Our understanding of many concepts covered in such works is profoundly different today. It's this understanding that authors and editors to organize information into an effective encyclopedia article. I'm afraid using such outdated works for anything but historical content would do more harm than good. For example, using virtually any kind of biology or medical article from the 1911 Encyclopaedia. Britannica. would be foolish because they were written without a clue about the genetics - which has become the key organizing principle for understanding virtually every field of biology and medicine. Likewise, many if not most articles related to astronomy, cosmology, and physics are probably beyond rewriting, since the authors barely had a clue about the size of the universe or the material and forces which form it. While I think that compiling online copies of public domain reference works is a worthy historical project, I don't think it's now a justifiable project for CZ considering the enormous amount of work that needs to be done to establish CZ as a new, top-notch encyclopedia. Best, Andrew A. Skolnick _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
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