http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/04/10/life-affirmed/
.well, "Life <http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Life> " approved, anyway. This is an absolutely amazing article. What is life? Biologists use the word 'life' for both the processes of living, and for the things that carry out those processes. Life, too, connotes the relationships among living things, past and present: it includes the entire living world - the biosphere - and the whole history of "life on earth". In theory, life might include entities, now unknown, that exist on other planets. Just what qualities would such beings have to possess for scientists to acknowledge them as alive? Could non-living things ever acquire those same qualities? What features separated the first living cells from the inanimate materials that formed them? The answers to such questions form part of the larger answer to that most basic of all questions in Biology <http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology> : "what is life?" This article focuses not on 'life', the noun, but on 'living', the verb: what activities do living entities perform, and what processes enable them to perform them?[1] It takes, as its theme, "Life is what is common to all living beings" (Christian De Duve).[2] That another article has been approved no big deal. What is a big deal is what this particular article demonstrates. I encourage you to click through and read it. It's remarkably well-written and readable, but also erudite - "magisterial" comes to mind. While the article is more the work of one person, Professor of Medicine at UC San Francisco, Anthony Sebastian, than of any other, it is a very robustly collaborative work. If you look at the (very lengthy) article <http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Life&action=history> history, you'll see that leading up to the article's approval (work now continues on the "draft <http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Life/Draft> page"), several others with genuine expertise on various aspects of the topic of life weighed at great length: in alphabetical order, Chris Day, Thomas E. Kelly, Gareth Leng, Nancy Sculerati, David Tribe, and many others. I don't know how many hours went into carefully working on this article, but it must have been hundreds. Why is this important? Again, look at the article <http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Life> . It is a model of readability and authoritativeness; it's beautiful. It is surely not perfect; I'm sure it can be improved in various ways. But now think about what this, just a single example, means for the prospects of really vigorous expert wiki collaboration. What Dr. Sebastian and colleagues have proven here, as Dr. Sculerati and colleagues did earlier with "Biology <http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Biology> ," is that when genuine experts get together, with the support of the general public (which contributed some copyediting and technical assistance), the results can be nothing short of beautiful. I don't mean to attack what the Encyclopedia of Earth <http://www.eoearth.org/> and Scholarpedia <http://www.scholarpedia.org/> are doing, but it appears they are, for the most part, simply using a wiki to host articles written by single individuals. The prospects of such enterprises are no greater (or less) than those of the mostly noncollaborative (but wonderful) <http://plato.stanford.edu/> Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. These all have the potential to become fine (or finer) reference works, but the prospects of the Citizendium are truly exciting, precisely because of the power demonstrated by our collaborative experiments so far. Still, it's just one article, and we now have merely ten approved <http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Category:Approved_Articles> articles. The Citizendium has got to make it a higher priority to streamline the approval process, to make it automatic (press-of-a-button), to encourage editors to work toward approval more aggressively, and to ramp up recruitment in particular groups to get people actually using the process (since the process really doesn't begin unless there are groups of people working together). We're getting there. We can't do everything at once. But once some more improvements are in place, we'll be picking up the pace considerably. I will make sure we keep tinkering with the process until it works well. --Larry
_______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
