During our philosophy seminar under Klaus-Jürgen Grün this last weekend, we also consulted Wikipedia on our way towards trying to find a consensus. We were discussing unanswered questions about Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist and his short story about theErdbeben in Chili (Earthquake in Chili).
I took advantage of the opportunity and asked the many philosophers present (students, doctoral candidates and one professor) about their opinions on the quality of philosophical articles in the German Wikipedia version.
They were surprisingly agreed in their answers:
As a general rule, the articles are excellent, highly competent and very balanced. Consequently, most of the faculties of Philosophy now accept Wikipedia as a reference source!
Regardless of my personal enthusiasm about Wikipedia, it came as a bit of a surprise. After all, there are quite a few articles on scientific and historical themes in the field of informatics in Wikipedia which, although not wrong in principle, are far from perfect. And I still keep finding more than just trifles that would benefit from improvement!
This seems to be in stark contrast to the aforementioned comments by philosophers. Naturally, I find it easy to come up with an explanation:
Computer scientists have less time to spare than philosophers. They have too much work and their main concern is earning money. Those computer scientists who are retired are so fed up with informatics that all they want is to “put away the pen”. So they never concern themselves with informatics when they are pensioned.
Philosophers, however, remain philosophers all through their lives. They will never stop philosophizing!
There is another advantage for philosophers as opposed to computer scientists: they have learned to express things with high precision. We computer scientists, on the other hand, are world champions when it comes to solving problems with the artificial programming languages. Yet we are not capable of explaining complicated correlations in simple natural language.
So here is what I recommend:
My dear computer scientists! How about being less concerned with earning a lot of money and instead taking better care of your professional discipline – also in Wikipedia? What you should do is continue to do so when you are retired. And why not also practice and learn a little philosophy?
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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