Unmatched by no other philosopher

November 6, 2021 @ 7:59 am · Filed by under Misnegation

« previous post | next post »

From the Wikipedia article on Martin Foss (1889–1968), the German-born American philosopher, professor, and scholar:

Foss provides a fascinating and important theory for how change happens in life—a theory that has been unmatched by no other philosopher.

(source)

Possible solutions:

–> matched by no other philosopher

OR

–> unmatched by any other philosopher

Wikipedia will probably correct this within one or two days of the time I make this post.

 

Selected readings

 

[h.t. Annie Gottlieb]

November 6, 2021 @ 7:59 am · Filed by under Misnegation


9 Comments

  1. David Frier said,

    November 6, 2021 @ 8:39 am

    It's already fixed, as of 09:39 EDT 6-Nov

  2. Philip Taylor said,

    November 6, 2021 @ 9:08 am

    "Wikipedia will probably correct this within one or two days of the time I make this post" — Does Wikipedia correct anything, of itself ? I was under the impression that submissions, emendations, corrections, etc., were the responsibility of individuals (Wikipedia contributors) rather than of Wikipedia itself. Or was "Wikipedia" being used as some sort of mass noun, meaning the entire community of Wikipedia contributors in addition to the web site and the latter's functionality ?

  3. Daniel Milton said,

    November 6, 2021 @ 9:20 am

    Paragraph removed at 13:40 today (time zone?).
    Did you do it?

  4. Stephen Hart said,

    November 6, 2021 @ 10:08 am

    Anyone can correct most Wikipedia entries. Of course, then another person can recorrect the entry.

  5. Victor Mair said,

    November 6, 2021 @ 11:34 am

    I did not request the change. I know the Wikipedia organization and community well enough that what I wrote on Language Log would swiftly be noticed and acted upon. The system is very large, sensitive, and serious about accuracy. They also have a constantly roaming squad of sophisticated bots that notice any changes made to the millions of entries and inform human editors to take appropriate action and make corrections when necessary or called for.

  6. David Marjanović said,

    November 6, 2021 @ 12:43 pm

    Prof. Mair, you don't need to request almost any change to Wikipedia – you can make it yourself, simply by clicking on "Edit". That's the whole point of Wikipedia.

  7. Pau Amma said,

    November 7, 2021 @ 2:30 am

    Someone unregistered made the change very quickly, which brought in others to look at that section. That sentence isn't there anymore.

  8. Cervantes said,

    November 7, 2021 @ 9:05 am

    Of course, it literally means that every other philosopher has matched it, which is more interesting.

  9. Terry Hunt said,

    November 7, 2021 @ 4:36 pm

    @ Philip Taylor — As you imply, there is no "Wikipedia itself" in that sense: all writing and editing on (the English-language*) Wikipedia is done by the (many) volunteer contributors/editors, and there is no "staff" of paid or unpaid overseers of any kind working directly on the project. Around 100,000 separate individuals perform edits (of all kinds) on Wikipedia every month. Even the formulation of policies and procedures is arrived at by consensus and their implementation and enforcement operated as a communal effort by volunteers.
    (*The many Wikipedias in other languages are all parallel but separate projects, which have evolved their own procedures and standards and are in no way subordinate to the English-language Wikipedia.)

    The servers on which Wikipedia resides are run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which originated the (freely available) software that Wikipedia and many other wikis use, but none of the Foundation's employees are tasked with performing any editing functions on Wikipedia itself (though some doubtless do so on a private and individual basis).

RSS feed for comments on this post