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Comment by Strilanc | Hacker News Reader

This article says that the SEP is more comprehensive and more authoritative than Wikipedia. I agree that it's more authoritative, what with it being written by authorities in philosophy. But "more comprehensive"...?

Wikipedia is extremely broad. According to the article, the SEP has 1500 entries. Each of those is no doubt better than an individual Wikipedia article (more cohesive, more in-depth, etc), but I bet there's two orders of magnitude more Wiki articles on philosophy (nevermind other topics!). It no doubt has much wider coverage. How's that for "more comprehensive"?

I guess I'm just complaining about stretching a word to mean something more specific than it usually means. I think of comprehensive as including both in-depth focus and wide-ranging reach. So when the article counts only one of those aspects, and omits the other from the checklist, it feels like cherry-picking the outcome.

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Comprehensive within the field of philosophy? Yeah, I think that can be achieved. Wikipedia articles on core philosophical articles are often not much more than stubs - certainly the SEP examples seem more coherent and well structured. I don't think there will be more than 1500 articles better than C-class in Wikipedia's Philosophy category.

SEP articles are definitely better-structured, especially the ones on general overview subjects. I think that's a general property of the respective authoring models. Wikipedia is good at specific articles on well-defined subjects, while the general overview articles often range from incomplete to haphazard. An encyclopedia written by individual expert authors is better at crafting long overviews, which often require subjective and carefully curated synthesis of material.

But I use them both, for different things. The general overview articles are much better at SEP than Wikipedia. But Wikipedia has a lot more narrow articles, on subjects that SEP doesn't cover at all, or mentions only in passing in one paragraph of an article. For example, a huge number of short-to-medium-length biographies of historically important philosophers (SEP instead has a small number of quite lengthy biographies).

I do wish something like SEP existed in more other fields. I don't know of anything like it for computer science, for example.

Sometimes I find Wikipedia's "haphazard" articles are actually a benefit, because in practice they often seem to end up covering a subject from multiple angles, with lots of examples etc.

My impression is that in many cases this is because there were multiple major authors without a master plan for writing the article, so they ended up sort of putting it all in.

For someone (like me!) who's struggling to grasp a subject, seeing a subject described from multiple points of views, targeting varying levels of expertise, can be immensely helpful.

A traditional encyclopedia article, on the other hand, is probably more likely to be well-structured and comprehensive, but ... I think can be harder to grasp for someone that's not quite up to the material.

It may be kind of ugly, but the "Just throw it all in!" approach does have some real merit...

> I don't think there will be more than 1500 articles better than C-class in Wikipedia's Philosophy category

We're getting there! There are currently 793 philosophy articles [1] better than C-class in Wikipedia.

By quality:

* Featured articles: 41 [2]

* Featured lists: 4 [3]

* Good articles: 113 [4]

* B-class articles: 635 [5]

1. Summary table of philosophy articles by quality and importance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Philosophy_articles_b...

2. https://tools.wmflabs.org/enwp10/cgi-bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&...

3. https://tools.wmflabs.org/enwp10/cgi-bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&...

4. https://tools.wmflabs.org/enwp10/cgi-bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&...

5. https://tools.wmflabs.org/enwp10/cgi-bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&...

I don't think your second meaning of the word is wide spread. Comprehensive is not expansive or all-encompassing. A single article can be comprehensive if it self-contained and complete.

"complete; including all or nearly all elements or aspects of something"

It's fair for SEP to be described as comprehensive because it's an encyclopedia of philosophy... which leads me on to my main point.

What's not fair is comparing SEP to Wikipedia, which is a different thing. SEP and Wikipedia have entirely different problems to optimise for.

SEP can optimise for article authoritivity & comprehensivity because the rate at which new articles are added is much, much, much, lower than Wikipedia's. SEP don't have an article for new movie releases, books, actors, current affairs.

I have to confess I think the comparison between the two is somewhat disengenuous.

It's like comparing databases that make different CAP theorem trade-offs (and are designed for different scales) in a situation that's favourable to one of them, and reporting it as a fair and objective comparison... I hesitate to give an example because it may start a flamewar, but [dons flame-retardant underpants] it's like saying that SQLite is objectively better than CouchDB because SQLite doesn't have consistency issues.

SEP's model would fall flat on its face if were expected to do Wikipedia's job.

... what I'd like is maybe some sort of system of adding links between different encyclopedias, so a user can easily move between articles for a given subject in multiple places...

Totally, or maybe SEP could just contribute to Wikipedia

I wouldn't rule out it being more comprehensive. Given some small topic, it may be more likely that Wikipedia has an article on that particular subject, but it may be directly or indirectly covered in a subsection of some SEP article.

More like 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, depending on what you count (which languages / articles) and that is leaving aside the talk and other parts of the wiki commons.

It's just 1 order of magnitude, if we're comparing the same language. English Wikipedia has 19,339 articles on philosophy [1]. (Anyone know if there's a resource comparable to SEP in a language other than English?)

If we're talking all philosophy articles in all 291 Wikipedias [2], and (generously) assume that the average Wikipedia has 10% as many philosophy-related articles as English Wikipedia, that's 19,339 * 0.10 * 291 = 562,764 philosophy articles on all Wikipedias. That's 3 orders of magnitude more than SEP's 1,500 articles -- although that's not really comparing apples to apples as we're comparing many languages to one.

1. See Total x Total cell at lower right in matrix at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Philosophy_articles_b...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

Something can be comprehensive without being all-encompassing, no?

But, something that is all-encompassing would be more comprehensive than something that is not, yes?

Not necessarily so in separate fields.

God created everything. That's all-encompassing, but not comprehensive.

Another example might be, A correct compiler can compile any valid program. It's all encompassing. An optimizing compiler, that's can't handle template syntax is more comprehensive. Better answers in a narrower field. Finally the template aware optimizing compiler is all-encompassing and more comprehensive.

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