A plea from the SAAP Communications Director and Webmaster, David Hildebrand
Dear SAAP Community,
As some of you may know, there is an online, collaborative encyclopedia called the Wikipedia that now contains over 600,000 articles in English and is a top 50 website.
There are pages there for various topics central to our work, including American Philosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_philosophy) and "Pragmatism," here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism
As a core community of people who care deeply about American philosophy (and philosophy in general, of course) I strongly encourage you all to look at the Wikipedia, read it's entries and judge their accuracy and cogency. Anyone can add an entry or edit what's there.
In my view, our scholarly efforts in American philosophy place a special obligation upon us to make sure such a popular source of information is evolving.
I've linked to the Wikipedia under our website section called "Resources" under "links."
An open source world is already here. Let's add the fruits of our labors to the ongoing conversation, and begin to develop in ourselves imaginative, new habits for a rapidly changing intellectual ecology.
David
For those completely unintiated...
Here is the introduction from the website itself:
What is Wikipedia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IntroductionThe Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written collaboratively by many of its readers. It uses a special type of website, called a wiki, that makes collaboration easy. Lots of people are constantly improving Wikipedia, making thousands of changes an hour, all of which are recorded on article histories and recent changes. Inappropriate changes are usually removed quickly, and repeat offenders can be blocked from editing.
How can I help?Don't be afraid to edit—anyone can edit almost any page, and we encourage you to be bold! Find something that can be improved, either in content, grammar or formatting, and fix it.
You can't break Wikipedia. Anything can be fixed or improved later. So go ahead, edit an article and help make Wikipedia the best information source on the Internet!
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Dr. David Hildebrand
SAAP Communications Director
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy, Box 179 UCD
University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center
P.O. Box 173364
Denver, CO 80217-3364
Office: Plaza M108-H
Phone: (303) 556-8558
SAAP: http://american-philosophy.org/
PERSONAL: http://DavidHildebrand.org
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