Your first complaint ("updated at most once every four years") is fine, except that it's not that big of a deal for a 3000 year old field. As another comments stated, topics that are changing rapidly are updated more frequently.

But your second and third complains are about process rather than result. What exactly do you think could be better about the SEP if they had non-academic authors? Or decentralized control? Not in a hypothetical world where the editors are evil, but in the real actual world?

I think the answer is "not much, and lots would be worse", because those properties are key to the SEP's success. This is different than Wikipedia, which has a much broader mission and would be crippled by these restrictions.

Good point---for philosophy, the slow updates aren't a huge issue. But the article seemed to be holding up the SEP as a model for other endeavors, and this seems to limit its usefulness in many other areas.

The centralized, academic nature of SEP is fine for them, but it must result in a sort of elite bias. In my mind, that's a kind of limitation. I actually prefer the Wikipedia approach or something along those lines, which I do feel is often effective at capturing various viewpoints.

Ultimately, there exists no one perfect approach to online encyclopedia compilation. Pros and cons all around.

Right; even Wikipedia admits it may get to the point where most of the articles are reviewed by experts and locked to some degree.

> articles updated at most once every four years

That's not what this article says. "In exactly four years—or earlier if research has moved on significantly." Four years is the maximum time an article will stay unchanged, not the minimum.

Good call, I misinterpreted that.

> authors consist only of academics

I consider that a strength, not a weakness

For certain fields, I would agree.

However, academic philosophies are only part of the whole field. Practical philosophies, ones that make the topics much more accessible and relevant to everyday life, is another big component. (Mindfulness, stoicism, practical meditation, ethics, etc.)

Until last year, I avoided philosophy because I never found it relevant, interesting, or anything other than navel gazing. It turns out I was only exposed to academic philosophy.

Once I found more practical works, it became much more important to me.

That's interesting. Although I think the SEP works as a primarily academic tool, it would be cool if it could be annotated to include links to practical interpretations of the same ideas.

Do you think that holds for tech? I hear a lot more cutting edge stuff coming out of Googe or MS than I do from universities.

That's not true. Most of what I've found was done with Universities with it often published to ACM or IEEE. The areas I collect are security (esp high assurance), fault-tolerant systems, software engineering (esp automated), systems modelling, and specific use-cases (eg databases). I have skimmed over 10,000 papers on these topics to find that most of the best work is University or a company partnered with one with occasional great work out of Microsoft, Google,etc.

Further, I stumbled upon the meme expressed by Perrine [1], etc that tech continuously reinvents the wheel by making same failures or re-inventing same solutions from the past. There's a bunch of tech that hasn't caught up to stuff from 60's-80's in those papers I reference. You'll see me do my part by referencing it in places like this where it might apply. However, it reflects an overall trend that there's tons of wisdom that's not transferred to new tech generation and we need a Standford-style encyclopedia for it all. More likely a collection of books and Wikipedia-style articles so cross-referencing will encourage serendipity.

So, we could really use this. I considered creating one but Jeremy Epstein advised me to get real buy-in from academics first. That such a repository would probably need a lot for it to be effective, using a network effect I'm guessing. That's a lot more work than I have time for right now lol. Nonetheless, we desperately need it for INFOSEC and IT. Just for fun, I'd use only best-of-breed tools and methods its recommends to run the site itself. People would see it in action as they showed up.

[1] https://c59951.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/5085-1255-perrine.pdf

Completely seconded. Universities are where the bulk of CS and software research comes from. Pretty much every paper I've read, especially for systems software, has been from academia, with the notable exceptions of a few publicly funded research labs.

What do you call "tech"?

From your profile, you work at the "CNAG DNA sequencing centre in Barcelona", so you know that Google and MS aren't really doing cutting edge work on that area of technology, compared to, say, UC Santa Cruz.

However, you are are a Django developer, so the things you are interested in are more aligned with the types of things that Google and MS work on. Perhaps there's a bias in what you consider to be 'tech'?

Well, I can't say much for bioinformatics, but we certainly can't discount industry and open-source projects in the fields I'm familiar with like distributed systems and programming languages.

I mean, I might not value PHP, Python and Go as a matter of taste, but they have their own ideas worth documenting that were not created by academic researchers. In fact, I'd be suspicious of and programming language reference that was controlled by academics or any group with specific credentials because interesting developments in PL are extremely democratic and happen everywhere. (Including some pretty self-contained bubbles like the world of Chuck Moore and colorForth.)

Of course we can't discount them. My own field of research, chemical information as it applies to pharmaceutical research, is dominated by industry.

Given that collyw works in a bioinformatics organization, my underlying question was why collyw discounted all of the cutting edge technology coming out of academic bioinformatics research.

I could also have pointed out, say, cutting edge techniques in photochemistry for arene C-H amination, which came from a university (see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1326 ).

By limiting "tech" to those areas of software where Google and Microsoft have a strong business interest, then of course they will have a strong presence. I wanted to highlight that possible bias.

Illumina is coming up with most of the technology making the bioinformatics research possible. The bioinformaticians are generally running perl or python scripts on the data, not coming up with new technology.

I don't understand what this is supposed to mean.

New methods of analyzing data, which can be implemented as a script, is also new technology. But it sounds like you are excluding it as a possibility.

Again, what do you call "tech"?

Intel provides most of the CPUs that Google, Microsoft, etc. use. Can't I be equally dismissive and say that Intel provides the tech and Google/MS merely run programs on top of it?

I would say that what you are describing is research not tech. But yes when I originally posted I meant IT (though someone on here told me that term sounded very dated).

Then yes, there's more new IT coming out of IT companies than from research universities.

Thats fair, but I don't think the SEP is thought of as a technical resource.