Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Philosophy/Archive 23

Archive 20

Archive 21

Archive 22

Archive 23

Archive 24

improving the Argument from Authority page

The Argument from authority page could use some knowledgeable help. Among other things, there's a disagreement about whether an appeal to authority is always fallacious or is only fallacious under certain circumstances (e.g., whether the ostensible authority lacks expertise on the topic under discussion) and (ironically) whether it's legitimate to cite works by people who lack expertise in logical fallacies as support for the former stance. FactOrOpinion (talk) 14:58, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Oh geez. Yeah, pretty much nothing in that article is really worth keeping as it stands. Ironically, there's no shortage of self-appointed "experts" on the argument from authority, but that doesn't mean we need to listen to them! I've salted the earth :) - car chasm (talk) 16:56, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

It's true that the article has various issues. Concerning the original question: the argument from authority is often understood as an informal fallacy. But not everyone agrees on this and some hold that there are fallacious and non-fallacious arguments from authority depending on how the argument is used. On a short search, I found [1] and [2] for these two positions. One example of a non-fallacious use might be a jury that takes the opinion of an expert witness into account. Phlsph7 (talk) 17:32, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

I think you're misunderstanding. On the page itself there isn't "a disagreement about whether an appeal to authority is always fallacious or is only fallacious under certain circumstances". As the page itself says, "Historically, opinion on the appeal to authority has been divided: it is listed as a non-fallacious argument as often as a fallacious argument in various sources". These are two views that you find in various sources. Where reliable sources disagree, the page includes both views. It isn't Wikipedia's job to decide the answer on these questions per se, Wikipedia just presents the views that exist in reliable sources. I think the page does that perfectly fine in its current form. AlphabeticThing9 (talk) 14:56, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

N.B .to other editors: there's some history to this issue documented here - car chasm (talk) 16:14, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

The checkuser there confirmed that "There existed no other accounts on IPs used by the...account". I find accusations of sockpuppetry odd since there's only one account you've spoken to on the Talk page there. AlphabeticThing9 (talk) 16:26, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

You are certainly welcome to defend yourself on the investigation page if you feel the accusation was made in error. - car chasm (talk) 18:03, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

It's immature WP:FORUMSHOP. I guess you figure it'd be easier rather than really discussing the article if I got banned. But that's not going to happen so we're going to have to hash this out on a Talk page. AlphabeticThing9 (talk) 01:22, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

No, I'm not misunderstanding. I meant the disagreement on the Talk page about whether there are reliable sources for both views. I now see that I wasn't clear that the disagreement was on the Talk page. Referring to the page itself does not -- and cannot -- resolve the disagreement on the Talk page, per WP:WINARS. (As an aside, absent a survey of all sources to determine how many times it has been listed in each category, one cannot justifiably assert "it is listed as a non-fallacious argument as often as a fallacious argument in various sources." More to the point: the issue isn't simply how many times one can find sources that assert one or another view, but whether those sources are WP:RS for the claim in question, which is at issue on the Talk page and on WP:RSN.) FactOrOpinion (talk) 23:09, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

"it is listed as a non-fallacious argument as often as a fallacious argument in various sources" is a cited statement, it's in Reference 6. AlphabeticThing9 (talk) 00:43, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

I added another source so now it's references 6 and 7, but what I called Reference 6 in the previous comment is now Reference 7. AlphabeticThing9 (talk) 00:51, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Move discussion at Gautama Buddha

There is an active page move discussion at Talk:Gautama Buddha about moving the page Gautama Buddha to The Buddha. This is of particular relevance to this project as it pertains to a religious figure of significant global standing and wide-ranging impact in the history of religion, philosophy, spirituality and mysticism. Iskandar323 (talk) 13:34, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

FAR for Alfred Russel Wallace

I have nominated Alfred Russel Wallace for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the 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 "Delist" in regards to the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Z1720 (talk) 20:52, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Featured Article Save Award for Alfred Russel Wallace

There is a Featured Article Save Award nomination at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review/Alfred Russel Wallace/archive1. Please join the discussion to recognize and celebrate editors who helped assure this article would retain its featured status. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:49, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Review of Fallibilism

The article on Fallibilism underwent some major changes this year. Recently I removed some WP:OR, and I think the article could benefit from further review by philosophy experts. Thanks, Biogeographist (talk) 17:44, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Atheism FAR

I have nominated Atheism for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the 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 "Delist" in regards to the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Z1720 (talk) 02:26, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

RfC about liberalism and equality

You might be interested in sharing your views and !voting in this RfC about liberalism and equality. Is equality a foundational value of liberalism and, if so, should this be stated with wikivoice in the opening sentence of Liberalism? Gitz (talk) (contribs) 22:15, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:The Buddha

The page which had been Gautama Buddha was unsuccessfully proposed for a change to Siddhartha Gautama, then successfully changed to The Buddha, and is now being proposed for a change to Buddha. Your input and expertise would be most welcome at: Talk:The_Buddha#Requested_move_25_November_2022 Best, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 00:45, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

Help me with post-WP:MOVE with Bejahung

Below is what I see: ___________________

The page "Nietzschean affirmation" (links | edit) has been moved to "Bejahung" (edit | history | links | revert | log) (move log)

Please clean up after your move: Check if the page's categories have a sort key, and update it as necessary. Check and update the magic words DEFAULTSORT and DISPLAYTITLE. If "Nietzschean affirmation" does not remain a redirect to the moved page "Bejahung", make sure the incoming redirects and links point to the correct target, and update fair use rationales if there are any.

A redirect has been created.

Your move should now be reflected in the Wikidata item language link.

• The page Talk:Nietzschean affirmation has been moved to Talk:Bejahung.

FatalSubjectivities (talk) 17:15, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Hello

If someone would like to help me out bringing this from a draft to a real article it would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Draft:Critique of Economic Reason Cricketpedia (talk) 13:13, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

Popper's three worlds

Popper's three worlds has been flagged as an essay-style article with no inlines and no assertion of notability (thus is a CSD-A7 candidate). I know no Popper, but it looks like a topic that's foundational to his ontology (?). Anyone want to look at this article and try to clean it up? AllGloryToTheHypnotoad (talk) 23:21, 4 January 2023 (UTC)

Borders

Previously, borders left and right (and bottom) enclosed the whole of the Talk page content, reducing the space available for discussion text, and looking a bit distracting. I've boldly removed these borders, restoring this Talk page to the style of almost every other WikiProject Talk page; if that's not desirable, please just undo it. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 09:29, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

Seeking help in dispute with User:103.21.175.59 over their repeated removal of categories from an article

I'm not sure if this is the right place to look for help, but I am wondering if any editors with experience in articles related to philosophy can help to give outside input as anonymous User:103.21.175.59 continues to remove a book form philosophy book categories in which I think it clearly belongs. The article involved is Roland in Moonlight, and I have posted on both the talk page of the article and the anonymous user seeking to engage and better understand. Thank you to anyone who can give input or advice. Jjhake (talk) 01:48, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

navbox

I've boldly removed the Wikiproject navbox from the header for this page, it appears to have been breaking the formatting of the talk page when using the new skin. I'm not sure if we need the navbox on this page or not, but if so I think we may need to find a new way to display it as the new skin will display to anyone who is not logged out soon. - car chasm (talk) 07:02, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Unreviewed Featured articles year-end summary

Restoring older Featured articles to standard:

year-end 2022 summary

Unreviewed featured articles/2020 (URFA/2020) is a systematic approach to reviewing older Featured articles (FAs) to ensure they still meet the FA standards. A January 2022 Signpost article called "Forgotten Featured" explored the effort.

Progress is recorded at the monthly stats page. Through 2022, with 4,526 very old (from the 2004–2009 period) and old (2010–2015) FAs initially needing review:

• 357 FAs were delisted at Featured article review (FAR).
• 222 FAs were kept at FAR or deemed "satisfactory" by three URFA reviewers, with hundreds more being marked as "satisfactory", but awaiting three reviews.
• FAs needing review were reduced from 77% of total FAs at the end of 2020 to 64% at the end of 2022.

Of the FAs kept, deemed satisfactory by three reviewers, or delisted, about 60% had prior review between 2004 and 2007; another 20% dated to the period from 2008–2009; and another 20% to 2010–2015. Roughly two-thirds of the old FAs reviewed have retained FA status or been marked "satisfactory", while two-thirds of the very old FAs have been defeatured.

Entering its third year, URFA is working to help maintain FA standards; FAs are being restored not only via FAR, but also via improvements initiated after articles are reviewed and talk pages are noticed. Since the Featured Article Save Award (FASA) was added to the FAR process a year ago, 38 FAs were restored to FA status by editors other than the original FAC nominator. Ten FAs restored to status have been listed at WP:MILLION, recognizing articles with annual readership over a million pageviews, and many have been rerun as Today's featured article, helping increase mainpage diversity.

Examples of 2022 "FAR saves" of very old featured articles

Solar System 2007 FA J. K. Rowling 2007 FA June 26, 2022 TFA Antarctica 2006 FA Joan of Arc 2006 FA Speed of light 2010 FA

All received a Million Award

But there remain almost 4,000 old and very old FAs to be reviewed. Some topic areas and WikiProjects have been more proactive than others in restoring or maintaining their old FAs. As seen in the chart below, the following have very high ratios of FAs kept to those delisted (ordered from highest ratio):

• Biology
• Physics and astronomy
• Warfare
• Video gaming

and others have a good ratio of kept to delisted FAs:

• Literature and theatre
• Engineering and technology
• Religion, mysticism and mythology
• Media
• Geology and geophysics

... so kudos to those editors who pitched in to help maintain older FAs !

FAs reviewed at URFA/2020 through 2022 by content area

FAs reviewed at URFA/2020 from November 21, 2020 to December 31, 2022 (VO, O) Topic area Delisted Kept Total Reviewed Ratio Kept to Delisted (overall 0.62) Remaining to review for 2004–7 promotions Art, architecture and archaeology 10 6 16 0.60 19 Biology 13 41 54 3.15 67 Business, economics and finance 6 1 7 0.17 2 Chemistry and mineralogy 2 1 3 0.50 7 Computing 4 1 5 0.25 0 Culture and society 9 1 10 0.11 8 Education 22 1 23 0.05 3 Engineering and technology 3 3 6 1.00 5 Food and drink 2 0 2 0.00 3 Geography and places 40 6 46 0.15 22 Geology and geophysics 3 2 5 0.67 1 Health and medicine 8 3 11 0.38 5 Heraldry, honors, and vexillology 11 1 12 0.09 6 History 27 14 41 0.52 38 Language and linguistics 3 0 3 0.00 3 Law 11 1 12 0.09 3 Literature and theatre 13 14 27 1.08 24 Mathematics 1 2 3 2.00 3 Media 14 10 24 0.71 40 Meteorology 15 6 21 0.40 31 Music 27 8 35 0.30 55 Philosophy and psychology 0 1 1 – 2 Physics and astronomy 3 7 10 2.33 24 Politics and government 19 4 23 0.21 9 Religion, mysticism and mythology 14 14 28 1.00 8 Royalty and nobility 10 6 16 0.60 44 Sport and recreation 32 12 44 0.38 39 Transport 8 2 10 0.25 11 Video gaming 3 5 8 1.67 23 Warfare 26 49 75 1.88 31 Total 359 Note A 222 Note B 581 0.62 536 Noting some minor differences in tallies: A URFA/2020 archives show 357, which does not include those delisted which were featured after 2015; FAR archives show 358, so tally is off by at least one, not worth looking for. B FAR archives show 63 kept at FAR since URFA started at end of Nov 2020. URFA/2020 shows 61 Kept at FAR, meaning two kept were outside of scope of URFA/2020. Total URFA/2020 Keeps (Kept at FAR plus those with three Satisfactory marks) is 150 + 72 = 222.

But looking only at the oldest FAs (from the 2004–2007 period), there are 12 content areas with more than 20 FAs still needing review: Biology, Music, Royalty and nobility, Media, Sport and recreation, History, Warfare, Meteorology, Physics and astronomy, Literature and theatre, Video gaming, and Geography and places. In the coming weeks, URFA/2020 editors will be posting lists to individual WikiProjects with the goal of getting these oldest-of-the-old FAs reviewed during 2023.

Ideas for how you can help are listed below and at the Signpost article.

• Review a 2004 to 2007 FA. With three "Satisfactory" marks, article can be moved to the FAR not needed section.
• Review "your" articles: Did you nominate a featured article between 2004 and 2015 that you have continuously maintained? Check these articles, update as needed, and mark them as 'Satisfactory' at URFA/2020. A continuously maintained FA is a good predictor that standards are still met, and with two more "Satisfactory" marks, "your" articles can be listed as "FAR not needed". If they no longer meet the FA standards, please begin the FAR process by posting your concerns on the article's talk page.
• Review articles that already have one "Satisfactory" mark: more FAs can be indicated as "FAR not needed" if other reviewers will have a look at those already indicated as maintained by the original nominator. If you find issues, you can enter them at the talk page.
• Fix an existing featured article: Choose an article at URFA/2020 or FAR and bring it back to FA standards. Enlist the help of the original nominator, frequent FA reviewers, WikiProjects listed on the talk page, or editors that have written similar topics. When the article returns to FA standards, please mark it as 'Satisfactory' at URFA/2020 or note your progress in the article's FAR.
• Review and nominate an article to FAR that has been 'noticed' of a FAR needed but issues raised on talk have not been addressed. Sometimes nominating at FAR draws additional editors to help improve the article that would otherwise not look at it.

More regular URFA and FAR reviewers will help assure that FAs continue to represent examples of Wikipedia's best work. If you have any questions or feedback, please visit Wikipedia talk:Unreviewed featured articles/2020/4Q2022.

FAs last reviewed from 2004 to 2007 of interest to this WikiProject

If you review an article on this list, please add commentary at the article talk page, with a section heading == [[URFA/2020]] review== and also add either Notes or Noticed to WP:URFA/2020A, per the instructions at WP:URFA/2020. If comments are not entered on the article talk page, they may be swept up in archives here and lost. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:48, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

1. Conatus
2. Hilary Putnam (at FAR)

Project-independent quality assessments

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Project-independent quality assessments. This proposes support for quality assessment at the article level, recorded in {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and inherited by the wikiproject banners. However, wikiprojects that prefer to use custom approaches to quality assessment can continue to do so. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:32, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Comments for Renaissance

Hello, I have opened comments for Renaissance on the talk page that identifies problems with the article. If these receives no comments by monday then I will open a GAR for it. Onegreatjoke (talk) 19:10, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Philosopher

Somebody redirected to philosophy. I undid, but it obviously needs help. Surely more to put as to roles, rewards, even plight of being a philosopher. Hyperbolick (talk) 04:17, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm the one who redirected - it's not clear to me that there's content that can be sourced reliably enough to merit a separate page, i think most of the profession pages end up just becoming content forks; a philosopher is someone who does philosophy, ergo all information on what a philosopher does is derivable from what philosophy is. I don't think the rewards and plights of a philosopher sound like something that would be encyclopedic content per WP:NOT, and the "roles" of a philosopher aren't really separable from the roles of philosophy. - car chasm (talk) 04:24, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Some good occupational articles do exist. I view the philosopher as distinct from philosophy as clergy is to religion. There is a social role. There are stereotypes and archetypes and reasons why one ends up down this path. Hyperbolick (talk) 06:27, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

My own experience with philosophers is that they aren't much like clergy at all in their relation to their discipline, so I'm skeptical of the aptness of such an analogy. If you know of reliable unbiased sources for this comparison between clergy and religion, perhaps consider adding them to the article? However, if you admit to no knowledge of such sources to support your views, and they simply represent your own opinions, I believe that the article should be redirected again. Also, i think much like rewards or plights, archetypes and stereotypes are not appropriate content for an encyclopedia even if they are covered in reliable sources. Have you considered that perhaps wikipedia is not the place for these sort of non-neutral contributions? Perhaps a public outreach program at a university might be more appropriate for such a hagiographical type of article on the merits of the profession. - car chasm (talk) 07:13, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I agree that, in its current form, there is not much that would justify a separate treatment. But it seems to me that, in principle, a separate article could be justified. For example, there are articles like scientist, physicist, and chemist besides the articles on science, physics, and chemistry. They discuss topics like history, education, career, specialization, and demography. One problem with this analogy is that these roles are much more clearly defined than the role of a philosopher. This problem applies also to the analogy with religion and clergy. Maybe this problem could be avoided by changing the title to "Academic philosopher" or "Professional philosopher", since these roles are better delineated. As car chasm suggests, it would be helpful to base this decision on reliable sources. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:32, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Can't imagine things would be hard to find. How about this one in The Atlantic? What Do Philosophers Do? Outside of academia, that is. Hyperbolick (talk) 09:05, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Newspaper editorials are generally not considered reliable sources, a scholarly source of information would be much better. See WP:RSEDITORIAL for more details. - car chasm (talk) 14:45, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Deconstruction#Requested move 3 March 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Deconstruction#Requested move 3 March 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. ❯❯❯ Raydann^(Talk) 17:12, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Articles about disagreement

I noticed that there's currently a two-sentence article at disagreement. There's also an article for disagreements (epistemology) and for conflict (process). Are all three of these separate concepts? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:34, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

• I think disagreements (epistemology) and conflict (process) should be different concepts, one for the epistemological concept and one for the social concept. Disagreement could be either one, so I think that should probably be a dab page that links out to the other two pages and any other distinct ones that exist. - car chasm (talk) 02:33, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Removed weird html from this page

There was a bunch of html in this page that was being transcluded from the "header" page, which was why the reply button that usually works on talk pages wasn't working.

I didn't think anything added there was particularly useful, so I've un-transcluded it and pasted its content into this page with all the html commented out. If anyone wants to bring any of those links backs I don't have any objections per se, but please test and make sure that you don't glitch the editor if you bring any of that content back. - car chasm (talk) 02:44, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Thomas Nagel current wife

Thomas Nagel himself has posted to his article’s talk page explaining that he recently remarried and wants his article to reflect that. Is there any source online that can be used? Thriley (talk) 04:17, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Ex Falso (tag editor)#Requested move 7 April 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Ex Falso (tag editor)#Requested move 7 April 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. ASUKITE 19:48, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Ahimsa in Jainism

Ahimsa in Jainism has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke (talk) 14:29, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Audit of User:Jaredscribe's philosophy article contributions

Inviting an audit of my contributions in Philosophy related articles, insofar as I admit to a POV that is mostly aligned with the Aristotelian tradition, which I found to be under-represented on wikipedia. If you find anything dubious, please tag and inform me and all of us so that I and we can correct them.

https://xtools.wmflabs.org/topedits/en.wikipedia.org/Jaredscribe/0

Some editors have alleged that the neo-Aristotelian POV I have declared on my user page suggests that I may be POV-pushing, and alleged possible misuse of primary sources.

I remember making use of Aristotle himself in translation for some contributions to summarize Nicomachean Ethics and Politics (Aristotle). Some of these can probably be improved, but so can the whole article - both of which are still very incomplete and need all the help they can get.

I also wrote the lede sentences for Aristotelianism, based on a composite of what I'd gleaned from introductions by 20th century translators, editors, exponents such as Jonathan Barnes, Richard McKeon and Mortimer J. Adler. Please improve it if you can.

The article had gone for 20 years without a lede summary, and mine was (I thought) better than nothing. Since wikipedia is WP:NOTFINISHED, I thought it would be ok to collaboratively improve it - and it still needs alot of that.

The lede paragraph should probably improve to include some kind of mention of potentiality and actuality, immanent realism of universals within particular individuals, and hylomorphism in specific ontology, and belief in an "unmoved" prime mover. I couldn't figure out how best to say it at the time.

I'd hope to return to these articles and improve them with more WP:RS of a WP:Secondary nature, but haven't had time yet. :(

I love this wikipedia project very much and hope I don't get expelled for this, but the ANI discussion is leaning that way now - mainly because I've written diatribes against positivist scientism, which had its heyday and is nowadays a fringe opinion in philosophy of science, but still a mainstream opinion in society and therefore among wikipedia editors.

Sorry for letting you all down. Jaredscribe (talk) 07:24, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

For the record, JaredScribe has now been blocked indefinitely. Not for writing "diatribes against positivist scientism", but for "aspersions, tendentious editing, synth", along with "WP:TIMESINK". [3] Given the concerns raised in that thread - which included issues with synthesis, poor or non-existent secondary sources, and an apparent inability to understand core WP:NPOV policy, amongst many others - a review of JaredScribe's contributions to philosophy subjects would probably be wise. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:23, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Project-independent quality assessments

Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.

No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.

However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:42, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

FAR for Bernard Williams

User:Buidhe has nominated Bernard Williams for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the 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 "Delist" in regards to the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:07, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

WP:Manual of Style/Philosophy

WP:Manual of Style/Philosophy was marked as a guideline on 23 November 2013 by User:Gregbard, with the edit summary: "this has achieved acceptance". I can't find any evidence of "a high level of consensus from the entire community" that this page should be made an official guideline. Can anyone point me to a relevant discussion? Thanks. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 18:05, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

I've added a "disputed" tag to the guideline since there's been no response here. If the promotion of this page to a guideline was never discussed, then it should be demoted and taken through the proper process. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 06:03, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

I agree. It might be better to designate it as an essay if there was no proper discussion with a consensus. Phlsph7 (talk) 07:37, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

I've tagged it as a dormant proposal. It will need global consensus to be restored to the MOS; or if you guys want to endorse it locally as a project, you could tag it as an advice page and move it into project-space. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 07:19, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

Merge Simulated reality and Simulation hypothesis

They both describe the same thing. 94.191.152.8 (talk) 13:32, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Looks like it to me, I've started a merge proposal discussion on Simulation hypothesis - car chasm (talk) 15:01, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

FAR for The Log from the Sea of Cortez

User:Buidhe has nominated The Log from the Sea of Cortez for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the 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 "Delist" in regards to the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:13, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Aurochs has an RFC

Aurochs has an RFC for WikiProject Philosophy/Science and WikiProject Philosophy/Aesthetics to critique its current cladogram. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. 89.206.112.13 (talk) 08:28, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

What is the stance of infoboxes and partners for women

I have noticed most men do not have their partners listed however women mostly do. Ayn Rand's webpage has her husband in it. Her husband's page mostly has stuff related to her. Emma Goldmann also has her husband's listed, despite their lack of noteriety outside of her. Mary Midgley also has her husband listed and he doesn't even have an article on here. Chefs-kiss (talk) 18:26, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

FAR for William Wilberforce

User:Buidhe has nominated William Wilberforce for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the 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 "Delist" in regards to the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:24, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Anon user on post-marxism et al.

Please monitor contributions by new editor 81.104.87.43 (talk · contribs), who has some decided opinions and is adding them to articles related to philosophical topics. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 21:53, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

PROD of Functional decomposition

FYI. The article Functional decomposition has been PRODed. The talk page lists it as being under the purview of WP:Philosophy, and so I call attention to this here. If anyone cares about it, they should take steps to clean it up a bit. I think its a valid topic for philosophy, but what do I know. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 00:39, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Endorsed PROD, this is total nonsense. We seem to have a lot of articles that try to independently re-derive philosophical concepts and theories that they presumably aren't familiar with, that do free association and pattern match based on similar words used in different contexts across different disciplines. There's no evidence they consulted any source on the broader topic, napalm it. - car chasm (talk) 01:29, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Missing article: Socio-politics

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Politics#Missing article: Socio-politics.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:41, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Deletion Discussion

A biography rated by this project is being considered for deletion. The article is Werner Krieglstein. The deletion discussion is found here. Full discloser of my own COI: I am his son. Dkriegls (talk to me!) 00:42, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

FAR for Conatus

I have nominated Conatus for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the 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 "Delist" in regards to the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. - car chasm (talk) 03:39, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Logic of basho draft

I am working on a draft Draft:Logic of basho and the topic is clearly notable, but my comprehension is definitely low on the topic. Can anyone help me out with it? Immanuelle ❤️💚💙 (talk to the cutest Wikipedian) 07:09, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello Immanuelle and thanks for tackling this difficult topic. I'm not sure I can be of much help. You could have a look at the 2nd section of Routledge Encyclopedia article. The Stanford article on Nishida talks a lot about basho and also has detailed information on the logic of basho/place. You could also try chapters 2 & 3 from [4].

Generally speaking, the logic of basho can be understood as a philosophical system by Nishida Kitarō. At its core is Nishida’s concept of "basho". This is a difficult term and is usually translated as place or field. According to the Routledge article, a basho is an experiential domain and there are 3 domains: empiricism, idealism, and acting-intuiting. The acting-intuiting domain seems to be particularly relevant to the logic of basho. You should probably also explore how the logic of basho is related to Nishida's logic of predicate. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:48, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

RfC

An RfC which may be of interest to the members of this project can be found here. Beyond My Ken (talk) 03:57, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Proper article for "History of philosophy"

I saw that we lack an article on "History of philosophy". This seems to me an important oversight. We had an article earlier. But it had various issues and was eventually merged into the history section of the article "Philosophy" 7 years ago. The corresponding discussion is found at Talk:Philosophy/Archive_30#History_too_long. The normal setup would be to have a detailed treatment of the topic in the article "History of philosophy" instead of only a short overview in the history section of the article "Philosophy". I'm thinking about writing the article "History of philosophy". But this would be a lot of work so I was hoping to hear what others think before I get started.

@Snowded, Fgnievinski, Frenditor, Andrew Lancaster, Nimit, and CircularReason: (pinging some of the editors involved in the original discussion) Phlsph7 (talk) 13:51, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

I think it would definitely be a lot of work, but if you are willing to do it, I for one would definitely support it, and read it as it progresses. Thank you, warshy ^(¥¥) 16:14, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to fill out the body just by poaching references from other pages, you would only really need a dedicated bibliography to deal with the big, overarching developments from one school of thought to another. Everything else would only need a general summary of major figures and movements. If you start working on a draft I would be more than happy to pitch in with style fixes and such. Orchastrattor (talk) 18:19, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

One of the books I've studied in detail on the subject is:

• Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1979.

I don't know if this item is part of your bibliography or not, but I thought I could maybe suggest to include it too. Thank you, 16:23, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Hi warshy and Orchastrattor and thanks for your feedback! It may take a while before I have something to present. But your help in reviewing, fixing styles and the like would definitely be welcome! I've only done a short initial literature review and I've found a few sources that may be good for the general overview. Popkin 1979 is not as general but it could be useful for various sections so I'll see if I can get my hands on it. Phlsph7 (talk) 19:44, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

The main problem that springs to mind here for me is how we define the scope, present everything in a coherent picture, and keep it within a reasonable length - I think it's possible to write a coherent article on the "History of Ancient Greek philosophy", or the History of Western philosophy, or "History of (Insert country, language, religion here) philosophy" - which often does end up being 80% of the "X philosophy" article, anyhow - but trying to shove a bunch of different distinct/disjoint traditions together in one article seems counter-productive, at some point we've just made poached and summarized versions of articles that don't even relate to each other. Also, if we're not careful, because the history of Western philosophy is much more thoroughly studied (and it's the type species of what "philosophy" is), it will be very hard not to prevent it from dominating, which will probably result in somebody throwing a (somewhat justifiable, perhaps) Template:Global on it.

I'm also not optimistic that there's much to poach much from other history pages, a lot of them are full of WP:OR, and most of the citations that exist go to EB1911, other PD sources, or Bertrand Russell, which, yeah, are all technically WP:RS, but I wouldn't trust anyone of those if they contradicted any more recent source, which they frequently do - the history of philosophy as a discipline has mostly taken off in the last 50 years and if the older sources contain any information on a particular subject it's usually now widely considered to be wrong. If you want to improve our coverage of history of philosophy, those individual pages are probably the best place to start, any of the pages in the subcategories of Category:Philosophy by period or Category:Philosophy by country would probably benefit from a rewrite.

If we also want an article with the title History of philosophy, why not focus on the History of Philosophy as a discipline instead, similar to the History article, rather than giving the history of every kind of philosophy? If we also want to write an article that just covers all the events in philosophy, I think a list or a timeline is probably a better format. Timeline of Western philosophers and Timeline of Eastern philosophers don't seem to be in great shape but they might be a good starting point. - car chasm (talk) 19:49, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Also I'd definitely second the recommendation of HOPWAG as a source, from experience it's a fantastic starting point for research on basically any topic it's covered so far - citing the podcast itself might get a bit hairy if other people don't realize Adamson is an expert, but he also adds a bibliography to every episode of what usually end up being the best WP:SCHOLARSHIP sources that exist for any given topic from the most widely cited experts in the field. - car chasm (talk) 20:10, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

You are right that there are many challenges to writing such a general article. And discussing some of them before diving in is helpful. The scope is defined by the reliable sources, i.e. whatever they say is important enough to be included in the history of philosophy. The idea behind writing specifically this article rather than working on timelines is that this is a really notable subject: there are countless books about this specific topic. So not having an article on it seems like a significant lack. If people can write coherent books on it, maybe we can also have a coherent article on it. But the problem of incoherence is real and I'm not sure how to best deal with the issue of having disjoint traditions. I'll keep that in mind while reading the sources to see how they handle this issue.

My idea was to cover it in traditions (Western, Indian,...) and each tradition by periods where applicable (ancient, medieval,...). This is roughly how the reliable sources approach the subject. Balancing the traditions will be a challenge since the Western tradition is significantly bigger and more influential. For example, Grayling 2019 starts with the Western tradition but has a separate part dealing with the different non-western traditions.

I'm also skeptical about poaching information from other articles. Not so much because the idea itself is bad but because I'm not sure about the quality of those articles. As for the size, I'm planning to stay below 60 kB readable prose as per WP:SIZERULE but this can be difficult to plan ahead. Thanks for the HOPWAG-recommendation. I've only had a brief look at it but I'll give it a more detailed read now. Could you expand a little on what you mean by "History of Philosophy as a discipline" in contrast to "history of every kind of philosophy"? Phlsph7 (talk) 20:40, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Sure! by "History of Philosophy as a discipline" I mean an article that provides an overview of the academic field of study itself, (history, methods, scholars, major debates, etc), possibly starting with some early proto-examples that predate academia, then working chronologically through the academic discipline starting with works like Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy and working it's way to the present.

I found a few sources [5] [6] [7] that seem like they cover the topic.

This is admittedly different than the content of a textbook with the title "History of Philosophy" - which might be a good reason NOT use the title "History of Philosophy" for this sort of article, if we think it would cause too much confusion. Admittedly, now that I've dug up some sources, it does seem that Historiography of philosophy is another valid term for "History of Philosophy as a discipline" that can be used to distinguish the two. That article is currently redirected to a strange place, but what I was describing seems like it would probably fit with that title.

So on second thought, it's an article that we probably should have, but I now don't think it should be titled "history of philosophy" - never mind on that front. - car chasm (talk) 04:05, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. This is probably not the main topic of "History of philosophy" but many of the points you make could and probably should be included somewhere. The main bulk of the article would be about the philosophical theories themselves. But it would be a good idea to clarify what is and isn't meant by "history of philosophy", what role it plays, and what methods it uses. Maybe a section called "Background" could include some of these points. The sources you mention are quite relevant to this. Phlsph7 (talk) 07:36, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

@Phlsph7: yes we probably need something like that. It could eventually take some load of this article, and some others, although is not necessarily the initial aim. Carchasm's proposal also seems reasonable.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:00, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

I'd strongly recommend adopting summary style. One could easily split section Philosophy#History over the redirect History of philosophy, leaving behind an automatic {{excerpt}} of the lead only. Then, the new article's lead could be improved, so as to include a summary of all subsections. We should just avoid having History of philosophy duplicating and competing with Philosophy#History -- or, worse still, with all of Philosophy. fgnievinski (talk) 01:20, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello fgnievinski and thanks for bringing up the relation to the section "Philosophy#History". I agree with you that this section is too long in certain ways. For example, its treatment of "Indigenous American philosophy" is about as long as the entire treatment of "Western philosophy" and almost twice the length of the subsection "Islamic philosophy". In terms of the relative importance of these traditions, this is WP:UNDUEWEIGHT and not supported by the reliable sources.

My idea was to finish the article "History of philosophy" first and then use summary style to see how the section "Philosophy#History" can be improved and shortened. But that could take a while. I'm not sure that your idea concerning the lead excerpt works since having only the 3-4 lead paragraphs for the section "Philosophy#History" might be too little given its importance to the topic. In terms of the article "History of philosophy" competing with the section "Philosophy#History" or the article "Philosophy", did you mean WP:CFORK? This has to be handled right and I would value your input. But I don't see a problem in principle. It is common for other articles, as in Science and History of science as well as Mathematics and History of mathematics. Phlsph7 (talk) 07:43, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Indigenous American philosophy is a good example of what might go wrong when WP:SS is not followed: section Philosophy#Indigenous_American_philosophy competes -- and surpasses -- the corresponding main article. fgnievinski (talk) 23:43, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Regarding these points above:

The main problem that springs to mind here for me is how we define the scope

I thoroughly agree; duplication or excessive overlap might be something to watch for.

But we don't see eye-to-eye on this point:

trying to shove a bunch of different distinct/disjoint traditions together in one article seems counter-productive, at some point we've just made poached and summarized versions of articles that don't even relate to each other.

I would say they relate to each other under the rubric of "philosophy"; if we can have a WikiProject about it that is about a a bunch of different distinct/disjoint traditions, there's no reason we can't have an article as well, and I think we should. The articles History of mathematics, History of architecture, History of medicine, and History of religion all span millennia, cover the entire globe, and include vastly different traditions, and I don't see how "History of Philosophy" is any different. Clearly it should be designed as a parent article in summary style, with individual summary sections topped by a {{Main}} template to the first-level child article which covers the section topic in greater detail. My main concern is whether the top-level organization should be generally chronological, with thematic subsections within time period, or thematic at the top level. I think either way could work, and a look at how the hundreds or thousands of "History of ..." articles do it might offer some guidance. Mathglot (talk) 20:20, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the input! The most common organization found in the reliable sources is to have different parts for the different traditions and treat each tradition chronologically. For example, this is roughly the approach found in Grayling's "A History of Philosophy", in the "A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps"-series, and in Smart's "World Philosophies". The more specific books treating just one tradition also tend to be organized chronologically based on a periodization that fits that tradition best, like Kenny's "A New History of Western Philosophy" series or Mou's "History of Chinese Philosophy". But, in principle, it could also be organized thematically. Phlsph7 (talk) 20:49, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Just to give a short update, I started a draft at User:Phlsph7/History_of_philosophy. It is still in a rather crude state. Many sections are blank. What is there is unedited and has maintenance tags. It may need to be rewritten later and require shortening. It's probably easier to address these points once the draft is closer to completion. In its current state, it shows roughly the direction in which this is going. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:07, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I have another update on the draft. It has now referenced text in all its sections. Warshy already helped with grammar but there is still a lot to be done. I'll try to address the issues in the next few days but others would also be welcome to join in. Most of the text is still unedited and needs to be checked for grammar, spelling errors, repetitions, style problems, and better formulations. It stands at 68 kB readable prose size. It could be reduced a little but it is not too bad given the scope of the topic. The lead has currently 640 words, which is a little too long and should be reduced to around 500. The article has some wikilinks but many are still missing. Some wikilinks are to disambiguation pages. It also needs "main"-templates for all the major sections. There are various reference errors and a few "citation needed" tags. Some of the references need to be bundled. The article also needs categories. I would be interested to hear about other potential issues and improvements. Phlsph7 (talk) 17:18, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Phlsph7,

I am not in general a fan of histories of everything (in philosophy or elsewhere), but, just skimming, I am impressed. Do tag me if you would like me to review material on late 18th-to-20th century European philosophy when you have a penultimate version or have posted to Wikipedia.

Just one minor content note for now: this cranky review by a leading scholar of 19th-century German philosophy might merit a couple sentences: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/nineteenth-century-philosophy-revolutionary-responses-to-the-existing-order/. (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, btw, more than meets Wikipedia Good Source requirements.)

And one minor note on format/presentation: So much text! I am sure you are planning to do this already, but I want to reinforce the importance of breaking up the blocks of text with more subheads, images, or whatever. Otherwise readers will flee immediately and your work will be (almost, at least) for nought.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 18:46, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

@PatrickJWelsh: Thanks for all the ideas! Images would be important to make the article a little bit more appealing. You are right that various paragraphs are too long and should be split up. I'll have to see where it makes sense to add more sub-headings without bloating the table of contents too much.

I had a short look at the review article you mentioned. It seems to be quite critical of the "standard curriculum" of Continental Philosophy between 1840 and 1900. I don't want to give too much emphasis to the "non-standard curriculum" but mentioning some of their ideas would help make our section more well-rounded, like the role of the materialism controversy, historicism, and neo-Kantianism. I'll have a look at where I can fit this in.

I'll definitely get back to your review offer for the 18th-to-20th century European philosophy. I'm currently going through the text section by section to copy-edit and in some cases rewrite the material. I'll let you know when I finish the Western section, maybe another day or two. Except for some final touches, it should be ready then. Phlsph7 (talk) 20:12, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

@PatrickJWelsh: I've finished revising the text itself in the section "Western". But there is no hurry in case you are busy now or you want to wait for the final version. I hope to have the article ready for mainspace in about a week, including images, wikilinks, and the like. Phlsph7 (talk) 11:47, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

I read over the ancient Greek portion and made a few copyedits, but I think it's in really good shape overall. One thing I noticed is that I think this line as its phrased now might be a bit misleading:

Arabic-Persian philosophy proved influential for Western philosophy. During the early medieval period, many of the original Greek texts were lost. They only became accessible in the later medieval period thanks to the preservation and transmission by the Arabic-Persian intellectual tradition.

The Greek texts were lost to Western Europe, but they were preserved in the Byzantine empire, though the Latin translations of the Arabic did spur an interest in retrieving the originals. But your current text makes it sound like possibly the original Greek was lost completely, when it's actually the other way around; only a very slim minority of originally Greek texts survive in Arabic translation, most of the Greek philosophy we have comes from Greek-language manuscripts. - car chasm (talk) 06:59, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I appreciate your help with the copyediting. I reformulated the passage about the Greek texts to say that they were "not available in Western Europe". Do you know whether the term "Classical era" is commonly used specifically for the philosophy after the pre-Socratics and before Hellenism? I made a short search but I didn't find much. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:46, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I think it's somewhat common, looks like philpapers uses it for their category on the subject, and its mostly in line with Classical Greece, although many presocratics lived well into that time period. The only other term I see for the period is "Socratic" which also might work, but I've also seen "Socratic" used for the immediate circle around Socrates, or for only the minor schools like the Megarians and the Cyrenaics. - car chasm (talk) 01:44, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

I'll leave it as it is for now but it sounds like "Classical" and "Socratic" would also work. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:21, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

I went ahead and published the draft on the article page. Please let me know your thoughts. Phlsph7 (talk) 15:42, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

References

FAR for Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman

User:Buidhe has nominated Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the 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 "Delist" in regards to the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:44, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Query about Outline of philosophy

I've been doing some work on the main philosophy page, and I discovered this outline, which initially seemed like it could be useful in making decisions about what should be included and prioritized (or not). The closer I looked, however, the more questions I had. I posted these to the Talk page, but it seemed worth calling attention to here as well.

If it's just an issue of WP:BOLD, I have no problem making at least a few of the changes I suggest on my own authority. But I wanted to check first to see if there was some principle of organization I am not aware of.

I suggest it is probably best to conduct any discussion on the Talk page, to which I link above, so that any discussion is preserved for the record where others who look will be able to find it.

Thanks! – Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 18:47, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

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Template talk:Philosophy sidebar#Averroes?

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Witchcraft: Requested move

There's a discussion about moving the article Witchcraft to Witchcraft (classical) and moving Witchcraft (disambiguation) to Witchcraft instead, at Talk:Witchcraft#Requested move 19 July 2023. Esowteric + Talk + Breadcrumbs 06:41, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

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New philosophy stubs using AI summaries of reliable sources

I wanted to get some feedback on what the editors here think about using AI models, such as ChatGPT, to create philosophy stubs by summarizing reliable sources. Recently, I have been experimenting with how to use AI models to improve Wikipedia. There are many dangers involved since AI models were not designed for Wikipedia and often don't follow its policies. For example, if one asks ChatGPT to write a Wikipedia article on a certain topic, it produces text right away. However, the produced text often contains unverifiable or false information (so-called hallucinations). The produced text also lacks references. If one asks ChatGPT to provide references, it generates a list that often includes non-existing books and academic articles. For more details, see WP:LLM.

Current AI models do much better at summarizing text. So my idea was to give it the text of a reliable source and tell it to produce a summary of it. Of course, this only works when using an appropriate source that gives a balanced overview of its topic. Summarizing a full source is not possible with regular ChatGPT since the amount of text it can process is too limited. However, it is possible by using other variants, such as gpt-3.5-turbo-16k. Summarizing instead of producing new text mitigates the problem of hallucinations. But it introduces another problem since the produced text can contain close paraphrases of the original article. I tried to avoid this problem by including a second step: I used GPT 3.5 again to reformulate its original summary. Further steps needed are a human review of the output (to ensure compliance with Wikipedia policies) and to wikify the raw text output (add wikilinks, categories, short description,...).

As examples, I created the following 3 drafts for articles that we are currently missing: User:Phlsph7/Boundary (philosophy), User:Phlsph7/African Sage Philosophy, and User:Phlsph7/Philosophy of childhood. The sources they are based on are https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/boundary/, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/african-sage/, and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/childhood/. The drafts are not perfect for various reasons. One issue is that each one is based on a single source. Another issue is that they don't follow all Wikipedia guidelines. See, for example, MOS:RELTIME in relation to User:Phlsph7/Philosophy of childhood. And, as stubs, they are far from comprehensive. However, if human editors were to create stubs on these topics, their text would probably also have certain problems. I didn't check every single claim in the drafts but all the main claims are supported by the sources. WP:EARWIG catches a few stock expressions but I don't think that this amounts to WP:CLOSEPARAPHRASE. I was curious to hear from other editors: do you think that, despite their drawbacks, these stubs satisfy the minimal requirements to be published as articles? If not, what kinds of changes would be necessary? Or do you reject the idea of using AI summaries for stubs in general? Phlsph7 (talk) 08:04, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

Hi Phlsph7, I can see the idea, but personally I would be very skeptical about stubs produced from LLMs (for all the reasons you already state!). The biggest problem is the time to check the output - a bare minimum would be high levels of scrutiny for text-source integrity and possible copyright violations, but even then there is always the risk of details being missed. At the same time, the amount of effort that editors would have to put in for this level of scrutiny seems like it would not be much less than simply reading a wide variety of sources and writing a stub/draft themselves. So the benefit doesn't seem so great to me.

Another problem is that the use of a single source is not ideal as it may cover things in an idiosyncratic way (even good sources like the SEP may decide to treat certain topics in a way that is different to standard presentations). Editors would also have to check that there are other reliable sources available so that WP:GNG is satisfied. All this extra searching and checking would make any possible time/effort-saving even more marginal.

It seems to me that LLMs are better used for more limited changes such as suggesting copyedits, improvements to structure, clarity, etc. which can more easily be checked by editors. Saying all that, this is just my own opinion, and I think probably this is a question for a broader venue rather than here. Surely the question of "should we have LLM produced stubs on Wikipedia at all" should be answered before the question goes to specific wikiprojects. (Sorry if there have already been some broader discussions on this that I'm not aware of!) Alduin2000 (talk) 12:40, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Alduin's first point about a human being creating stubs costing much less effort than meticulously checking AI-written stuff, which will have subtle problems and require consulting sources anyway. Surely the question of "should we have LLM produced stubs on Wikipedia at all" should be answered before the question goes to specific wikiprojects. Agreed ... I also would vote "no" in that larger discussion FWIW: It creates a ton of work for human editors to check. Yes, human editors can also make mistakes creating stubs, but (1) AI (i.e., a human using AI) can generate stubs much faster than a human editor unassisted; I worry that if AI summaries become a norm or even accepted, misinformation and close paraphrases will overwhelm human editors, leading to the overall degradation of WP's average reliability. (2) AI-written prose is unaccountable; no one can ask an editor, "Why did you choose this wording?" in a talkpage discussion. The AI "chose" it.--MattMauler (talk) 13:14, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

@Alduin2000 and MattMauler: thanks for the feedback and explaining the concerns. I think you are right that, with this method, reviewing would take up most of the time when creating a stub. How much depends on the quality of the AI summary. If it is of a low quality then it may take more time to fix the draft than to write a new one. But if it is of a high quality then it could also save time overall. As for accountability: this always comes down to the editor who decides to publish it. They have to review it or ask other editors for help before publishing the draft. The relevant question for the editor would be "Why did you accept this wording suggested by the AI?". WP:GNG is also a good point. This should always be checked before getting started with the summary.

Concerning the general question should we have LLM produced stubs on Wikipedia at all: there has already been an extensive discussion at WT:LLM concerning how LLMs may and may not be used. The opinions are all over the place, ranging from general ban to no additional regulation needed besides the current Wikipedia policies. The current version of the proposed policy WP:LLM reflects a rough middle ground. I don't think that the method I proposed would violate it. But there is currently no specific policy in place regulating LLM usage on Wikipedia (besides established policies governing topics like bot usage and semi-automatic editing).

To be honest, I'm not 100% certain either whether creating stubs this way is a good idea overall. There are important dangers but it could also be a great opportunity to expand Wikipedia. It may be a good idea if we can find a way to avoid the dangers or at least minimize them. As I see it, one of the key points is whether publishing stubs created following this method would overall improve Wikipedia. For example, is it better to have no article on the topic of boundaries in philosophy or this article? The same goes for African Sage philosophy and philosophy of childhood. That is the reason why I asked the question here rather than in a more general place: someone with a philosophical background is required to assess the quality of these drafts. Do you think that drafts like these satisfy the minimal requirements for stubs? Phlsph7 (talk) 13:57, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Alduin and Matt, I think this is a case where the risk highly outweighs the reward - given the time to check an article, and the potential for this going wrong, I'd say we shouldn't do this, because it's not going to save good-faith editors any time.

When it first came out, I had ChatGPT generate an article on a topic I was familiar with that I knew didn't have a wikipedia article yet, that was obscure enough that it wasn't going to be in the training data. The output read like an entirely well-researched article with proper style and formatting, except for the minor problem that nothing in it was factually accurate. I'm worried about something similar here - I've seen ChatGPT subtly distort the meaning of text that it summarizes and invent outright fictions, but I think a larger risk is a summary that just doesn't say anything, in a way that's not readily obvious to someone already familiar with the topic.

For example, is it better to have no article on the topic of boundaries in philosophy or this article?

I'd say it's much better to have no article, I don't think the summary here actually tells you what a boundary is! This is supposed to be a summary of the SEP article? It's removed all of the pertinent information on the different types of boundaries, it just says the distinctions exist. At best it's an outline you could use to quickly go to the most relevant parts of the SEP article itself, but it doesn't stand independent of it.

In the case where it does say something substantial, on non-realist vs. realist theories of boundaries:

Realist theories regarding boundaries acknowledge the challenges and puzzles associated with them, considering boundaries as ontological entities

what it says is horribly mangled. Do non-realist theories not "acknowledge the challenges and puzzles associated with them", as this sentence implies? I'm pretty sure the opposite is true - Realist theories affirm the existence of boundaries as ontological entities despite the challenges and puzzles associated with them, which this sentence has inverted.

Meanwhile, in the time it takes to read that article over and diagnose what's wrong with it, someone could write a stub (or even start-class) article summarizing the topic instead. - car chasm (talk) 16:07, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for having a look at the draft. Short reply concerning the sentence Realist theories regarding boundaries acknowledge the challenges and puzzles associated with them, considering boundaries as ontological entities.: I'm sure that this could be stated better. It is supported by the following sentence in the SEP article: We may accordingly distinguish two main sorts of theories, depending on whether one is willing to take the problems at face value (realist theories) or to bypass them altogether, treating boundaries as fictional abstractions of some sort (non-realist theories).

I haven't done much work on stubs so I will rely on the feedback of others. I'll put the project on ice since all the responses so far were negative. Phlsph7 (talk) 07:22, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Philosophy of science

Philosophy of science has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke (talk) 23:16, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

RFC: Splitting qualia

It’s gotten very long and technical so I’m proposing it be split. Relevant talk page discussion. ~ Argenti Aertheri^(Chat?) 22:38, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

phenomenology (philosophy) nominated as "article for improvement"

I did a heavy edit of this article to give it a coherent TOC. It remains a total embarrassment, but I hope now that it is at least easier to improve.

If you support this, please #Support here or—hey!—just edit away with whatever you've got.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 23:25, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Fresh views at Nondualism/Nonduality

We'd love fresh views to move the discussion forward at Nonduality (spirituality) at this particular talk-page section: Nonduality (spirituality)#Bold move. Thanks! Wolfdog (talk) 00:25, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:National identity#Requested move 12 August 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:National identity#Requested move 12 August 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. — DaxServer (t · m · e · c) 08:18, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Argumentation theory#Requested move 23 August 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Argumentation theory#Requested move 23 August 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. —usernamekiran (talk) 15:22, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Dealing with wide-scale misuse of influences/influenced fields in philosopher template below

Hi everyone,

I am posting to inquire whether there is anything we can do to help correct the wide-spread abuse of these fields in the Philosopher Infobox template. Well-meaning editors add just more and more figures not supported by the article, which undermines the express purpose of the template: "to summarize (and not supplant) key facts that appear in the article."

Discussions like this, for instance, are just a waste of everyone's time. People who want to add figures should add them to the article in an appropriate place with supporting citations; or, if they aren't comfortable editing, they can instead make a request or open a discussion on the Talk page with the same information.

Please find below a transcluded discussion from the template Talk page. All opinions and ideas most welcome! — Preceding unsigned comment added by PatrickJWelsh (talk • contribs) 22:37, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Please see the discussion at Template talk:Infobox philosopher § Influences/influenced. (I replaced the transclusion template with this link since the discussion is starting to get lengthy and there was no link here for contributing to it—better to just click the link to read and contribute.) Biogeographist (talk) 20:04, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Harm reduction article discussion about content inclusion

There is a discussion at Talk:Harm_reduction#I_have_removed_links_to_specific_service_providers,_agencies,_clinics regarding the inclusion of a harm reduction services provider by name in the article. Graywalls (talk) 00:56, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

I looked at this and did offer an opinion. But I only even clicked through on the assumption that it would be somehow related to philosophy, which it was not.

In the future, would you mind reserving this board for issues related to this WikiProject?

Thanks, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 15:17, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Speaking of which, I announced it here, because I noticed the article was listed as of interest to WP:Philosophy. If editors in this project do not find it is appropriate, maybe it ought to be taken out? Graywalls (talk) 20:01, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. I will leave your question to any other editors who know more about this side of Wikipedia.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 20:44, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Arthur Schopenhauer's criticism of Immanuel Kant's schemata

This has had an original research tag for a while. Does anyone feel there are valid merge targets (perhaps back to Critique of the Kantian philosophy ) or whether this spin-off is valid and needed? My knowledge is not sufficient to make any bold actions. JohnmgKing (talk) 11:58, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Aside from being about 85% direct quotes, I don't think that one 1909 source establishes notability for inclusion in Wikipedia as its own article. If there's anything of value that could be moved to the article you mention (its own many problems notwithstanding), that would be appropriate. But I don't know whether this should be considered a merge or just the salvage of a paragraph worth of stuff from an article that probably will not survive nomination for deletion.

Thanks for bringing this up.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 13:50, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Patrick, I've listed it at AFD, hopefully someone will either rescue it, or it'll be cast into mount doom.JohnmgKing (talk) 15:55, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Daily Nous

This stub article just came through AfC and was done up by Justin Weinberg himself. Posting here in the hopes that some non-connected contributors have something to add, or are interested in watchlisting the article to make sure it stays WP:NPOV. -- asilvering (talk) 01:05, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

Hello, Please note that Power (social and political), which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of the Articles for improvement. The article is scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "Articles for improvement" section for one week, beginning today. Everyone is encouraged to collaborate to improve the article. Thanks, and happy editing! Delivered by — MusikBot talk 00:05, 23 October 2023 (UTC) on behalf of the AFI team

discussion of academic notability criteria

Editors might be interested in a discussion I started at Wikipedia talk: Notability (academics) #proposal for modification of guidelines.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 17:43, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Possible hoax on Lucretius (Level 4 vital article)

Your help may be needed on Talk:Lucretius, regarding part of the article that may be falsified information. Renerpho (talk) 19:41, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

Legalism (Chinese philosophy) overhaul

Hello, a lot of work has recently been done to fill out and source the linked article, and it deserves some more eyes on it for copyedit and polish. Remsense聊 13:54, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Discussion on inclusion criteria at Template talk:Social and political philosophy#Obscurity

Hi all, just wanted to flag up a discussion I've started at the section above regarding inclusion criteria for Template:Social and political philosophy—some extra pairs of eyes would be welcome to avoid just arguing the toss. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 16:17, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Draft:Fairness

Wikipedia has no article on Fairness, just a disambiguation page. I have a draft underway, but it needs some philosophy. BD2412 T 03:03, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

This could be important...

Hi all, a bit of a strange situation here. Last year, an editor named Darylprasad was banned for their work on philosophy articles. Somewhat uniquely, they didn't engage in vandalism or spreading hoaxes, they wrote articles which were extremely detailed and well-cited, but to an inappropriately extreme extent. The principle articles they worked on (with diffs of before the edits were removed) were Proclus, Plotinus and Neoplatonism. I really think that there is a lot of content which is still usable, if trimmed and consolidated immensely. Each three of these articles is currently C-class, and it would be a shame if so many possible improvements were lost to time.

I'm wondering what philosophy-inclined editors think of this, courtesy pings to Phlsph7, PatrickJWelsh and Cinadon36. At the thread that banned this user there were accusations of OR. This is perhaps observable in the philosophy sections (although I've really not looked into this at all), but in the Biography section of Proclus, for instance, the citations are all to scholarly sources, and if adjusted/tweaked could become could possibly improve the current biography quite a bit. Aza24 (talk) 07:32, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. I had short look at the version of Neoplatonism before it was reverted. It has a readable prose size of 170 kB, which is way beyond the recommendations of WP:SIZERULE. I randomly picked the section on Hypatia. The sourcing seems to be fine but I didn't do any spotchecks. Usually, I would expect this type of section to explain what her views on Neoplatonism were. However, this section is mainly an account of her life. Maybe these details could be used in another article but I don't think they belong into this article.

If the case is similar for other contributions of Darylprasad then I assume something could be done with them. However, it could be a time-intensive process to figure out what to use, where to put it, and to do the spotcheck to ensure that the sources actually support the claims. From the denied unblock requests at their talk page, I get the impression that the problem was more with the editor's behavior than with the sourcing. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:21, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Aza24, thanks for pinging me. I believe the text should only be reinstated by editors who review the sources. Reintroducing portions of his work blindly, without consulting the sources, would be a mistake. It is preferable to maintain a C-rated article than to risk creating a fraudulent GA article. Cinadon36 10:53, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

The Star of Sophia

A two-part proposal:

First, I would like to nominate @Phlsph7 to be awarded the Star of Sophia.

This is merited most of all, I believe, by the tremendous amount of time and work they have put into bringing the main Philosophy article up to FA status. Not so many months ago, the article was in sorry shape indeed (e.g., [8]). They have also raised Logic to FA status and contributed to many other philosophy articles besides[9]. Furthermore, in all of my interactions with them, they have demonstrated the kind of collaborative spirit that exemplifies Wikipedia at its best.

Second, I propose that, after this, we officially close out the Star of Sophia, which would simply be to make de jure what appears to have been de facto the case since at least 2015. This is too small of a community for us to be regularly voting on the quality of one another's edit histories.

Thanks for your consideration!

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 17:08, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't have that article on my watchlist and so hadn't noticed Phlsph7's work there, but I have seen enough of Phlsph7's good work elsewhere to support the nomination. It appears that according to the rules I'm not allowed to vote because I'm not on the project participants list, but I have edited many articles within the scope of the project.

@PatrickJWelsh: Why phase out the Star of Sophia when you have just reactivated it and have implicitly endorsed its value by nominating someone for it? I hadn't heard of the Star of Sophia before, and now that I know about it, the award seems to be a good way to show off what good editing looks like and to inspire other editors. Perhaps the award faded away because people stopped talking about it here; the last time it was mentioned on this talk page was in September 2011. If someone asked for nominations here on this talk page every six months, it would regularly remind editors about the reward, and since it only takes three votes to bestow the award, the fact that this is a small community may be no obstacle. (That claim can be tested by whether three people vote now for the obviously worthy Phlsph7.) Perhaps during one six-month period there would be no nominations, but I don't see a problem with that: if there are no nominations, just wait another six months and ask again.

Would anyone like to take responsibility for posting a biannual (or otherwise periodic) Star of Sophia nomination request message here, starting, say, six months from now, in June 2024? Biogeographist (talk) 21:13, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Biogeographist,

If others want to revive the award, I have no objection to seeing how that goes. I'm all for Wikilove! My only concern was that it would be really crumby for someone to be nominated and basically just receive the cold-shoulder from the rest of the group. You're right, though, that three is a low bar. As long as we nominate responsibly, it's not likely to be an issue.

Another benefit that had not occurred to me until reading your post, is that this could help bring attention to good work that was otherwise not even on some of our radar. Which is always encouraging to see.

Also, we might want to expand voting eligibility to folks like you who are active in the project, but just haven't bothered to add your name to that list, which to the best of my knowledge does nothing more than add a category to the bottom of your user page. Just off-hand, though, I don't have a proposal for what kind of language to add in order to best capture this.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 21:44, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Getting L1 and L2 vital articles through FA is tough because of their scope, and valuable because of their visibility (144k page views for Philosophy in the last 30 days and 63k for Logic). It's a star well earned. --RL0919 (talk) 22:12, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

I concur. It is a well deserved recognition for all the work that Phlsph7 has been doing in the entire Philosopy area. He also thought of, wrote, and published the huge new entry History of Philosophy His contributions are just amazing. Well deserved, Kudos!! warshy ^(¥¥) 22:25, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Well, that is three votes of enthusiastic support! (Or, four, if you count the nominating editor.) I am going to operate on the assumption that no one cares about the weird project "membership" requirement so long as the editor has been sufficiently active to make an informed assessment of another's work. Which means the award has been bestowed!

Unfortunately, however, the original creators of The Star of Sophia neglected to add it to Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Wikipedia_Awards. It's easy to pull up the image, which is named star_of_Sophia.png, but I can't figure out how to create the actual template.

Is there any chance someone else here knows how to do that? It would be kind of lame just to add their name to a list that almost no one knows exists. We need something that looks like the other WikiProject awards to post to the user talk page.

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 05:04, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

I created a {{Star of Sophia}} template. Follow the instructions in the template documentation to place it on the recipient's User talk page. --RL0919 (talk) 07:15, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Many thanks, @RL0919! The only instructions I could find were barely even instructions, and my efforts to copy markup from other awards generated only a complete mess. Yours looks great.

All to all, I just posted it on behalf of the community to @Phlsph7's talk page. I took the liberty of composing copy for the award myself. But don't be shy about editing if you see fit. It's from all of us!

Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 21:56, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for the nomination and all the support. This is a great honor! Phlsph7 (talk) 08:45, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

Template:Philosophy_sidebar

Edit: Two proposals about philosophy sidebar of possible interest on its talk page, rather than here, as originally posted. Sorry, all, for the mix-up! Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 18:38, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

Template:Asian philosophy sidebar

Here's another philosophy template that could use some improvement, specifically the layout rather than the content: {{Asian philosophy sidebar}}. See more at: Template talk:Asian philosophy sidebar § The layout of this sidebar could be improved. Biogeographist (talk) 16:44, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Kantian ethics

Kantian ethics has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 22:27, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Divya Dwivedi has an RfC

Divya Dwivedi, which is within the scope of this WikiProject, has an RfC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. Beccaynr (talk) 00:06, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Power: A New Social Analysis

Power: A New Social Analysis has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 21:40, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Gary L. Watson

I just created a stub article for philosopher Gary L. Watson. Thriley (talk) 22:12, 21 December 2023 (UTC)