Monday, February 27, 2012

Logic Museum ban lowered

Somewhat to my surprise, the ban on Logic Museum Wikipedia links has been removed. However, plenty of absurdity still remains. It now has a special page to itself here. This means that a special team of Wikipedians, none of whom has any expertise in medieval Latin, to my knowledge, has been assigned to monitor any links to the museum added by a 'non trusted' person, and delete them. So anyone who added a link to this question by Duns Scotus, "Whether a material substance is individual through its actual existence" is in danger of being banned.

The oddity is that this kind of censorship doesn't bother Wikipedians, even though they are extremely bothered by other kinds of censorship. Thus this article on the pornographer Luke Ford has a number of links to porn sites, and this user managed to upload more than 25,000 pictures of porn stars onto Wikipedia's image repository.

What's so dangerous about medieval Latin, that Wikipedia readers are not allowed to see it?

7 comments:

William M. Connolley said...

Oh go on then. Give me a clear example of an article that would benefit from a link, and what that link should be.

Edward Ockham said...

Well how about the logical works of John Buridan (Tractatus de Consequentiis, Summulae de Dialectica, Quaestiones in analytica priora, In libros posteriorum analyticorum. Partially translated.

Edward Ockham said...

Sorry, for the Wikipedia article on Buridan.

William M. Connolley said...

Hmm, not quite obvious how to slip that in. Got anything that addresses "Buridan also maintained that impetus could be not only linear, but also circular in nature, causing objects (such as celestial bodies) to move in a circle."?

Edward Ockham said...

You mean one cannot link to an author's works, unless that work is mentioned in the article?

The article is terrible anyway.

William M. Connolley said...

Well, I was hoping for a better example.

I did at least improve the article a little bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean_Buridan&action=historysubmit&diff=479170954&oldid=476901276

Edward Ockham said...

>> I did at least improve the article a little

Very good. Perhaps the word 'Jaggedism' should go into the dictionary. (Yes, I know that one wasn't by Jagged). To impute spurious priority or influence.