<story><title>After 20 years, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy thrives on the web</title><url>http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/july/online-encyclopedia-philosophy-073115.html?a=1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hackuser</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s sad how rare authoritative, free resources are on the web. It&amp;#x27;s cliche to say how incredible an opportunity the Internet presents to share the world&amp;#x27;s knowledge, but the most valuable knowledge, the serious scholarship, is effectively withheld from the public. Imagine how some debates would change if more authoritative resources were easily accessible (I don&amp;#x27;t want to exaggerate the value of &amp;#x27;authority&amp;#x27;, but it&amp;#x27;s a much better starting point than Wikipedia) and cited with a link, such as in HN discussions. Partly as a result the Internet is mostly rumor and popular notions, not knowledge.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve even turned to SEP for mathematical concepts (to the extent it covers math), for example, because there is no free authoritative resource in that field.</text></comment>
<story><title>After 20 years, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy thrives on the web</title><url>http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/july/online-encyclopedia-philosophy-073115.html?a=1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>avivo</author><text>This is a fascinating example of the academic status quo being incentivized into creating valuable freely accessible knowledge.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m curious how being invited or accepted to write an article on topic affects academic prestige and tenure decisions. Is Brian Orend who wrote &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&amp;#x2F;entries&amp;#x2F;war&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&amp;#x2F;entries&amp;#x2F;war&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; considered the canonical living expert on the philosophy of war?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d love to know more about the incentives and culture around this. I&amp;#x27;m sure there are many insights one can draw about building valuable evolving repositories of knowledge from recognized exports.</text></comment>