Socrates Back on the Street: Wikipedia’s Citing of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Abstract

In this chapter I present a study of how a new generation of “open access” scholarly resources is being taken advantage of by those contributing to popular sources of knowledge. The study explores Wikipedia’s citation of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), as an innovative and open project of the academic community. SEP was begun in 1995 by Edward N. Zalta at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information (Perry and Zalta 1997). Zalta set out to create a “dynamic” encyclopedia that combined peer review with ongoing updating and revision. Entries offer internal and external linkages to related materials, as well as access to the author’s homepage and email. SEP is intended to be “useful both to professional scholars and the general public” (Perry and Zalta 1997), and, as an important part of that, it is entirely free to read online. This has been made possible by a variety of grants, with a current program to have it funded by an endowment, with support from research libraries and philosophy departments. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.