Philosophical Research:Spaghetti containment procedures

page half finished

table of contents please dock here:

Intro

One thing that is clear when reading any nonfiction text or resource, whether that resource may be one about physics, studying newly-discovered phenomena, or presenting different interpretations of the workings of societies, is that a nonfiction text exists to convey information. Whether some particular resource is a series of prose articles describing something, or an intricate ontology graph dividing wordless concepts from each other, it exists for readers to observe and explore it and then ask if the patterns inside are accurate to the original phenomenon it refers to.

But there is a problem. How do you allow readers to properly observe and explore without getting lost? If an article contains connections to things a reader is not familiar with and would not know where to look up, it can become difficult for the reader to get far enough into the text to learn anything.

science and marxist philosophy both have a terrible problem of tossing up impenetrable walls of sudden new terms

at the same time the world is awash in misinformation and the refusal to understand known or tentative theories of reality

in order for people to properly become educated all this special language must be contained

Items are not words

proposition Items are a good example for the core of what an Item should be. a proposition is not its superficial written sentence, but instead is meant to be the mathematical model connecting a series of wordless concepts inside it.

contain jargon terms in Lexemes. Lexemes can be used to catalogue any and every word necessary to understand science or philosophy, after which they can be linked to Items labeled in more common language

Name Items in country-independent language

Items, in terms of their outward-facing label, should be named in language independent of writers' country, population, religion, and culture — a form of language sometimes referred to in the MDem text and adjacent materials as "post-language".

In many cases this will also apply to parallel ideologies: words such as "Stalinism", "labor aristocracy", and "aleatory materialism" should be avoided because they are specific to a localized sect of Marxism and happen to come with a highly-specific meaning which would not be intuitive to associate with that word for anyone outside that localized sect or party.

in many cases this requirement may seem difficult or impossible to fully achieve because some combinations of concepts are fundamentally confusing to people and people fundamentally cannot agree on the same thing to call them. if this happens, make broad use of the ability to put multiple labels on items, and simply commit to the same concepts having a myriad different names. Items are given numerical identifiers for a reason; make full use of the fact that numerical identifiers are technically not language and commit to the integer number being the only mandatory name that everybody must use.

Dialect spellings

Occasionally there will be entries in which a word comes up in an alias or word definition which would be useful for finding the page but has different spellings in different countries, such as "color" and "colour". While it is okay to pick one and use it consistently for any particular page, you also want people to be able to search for the page by using either term. There are a few different ways to do this.

Within definitions on Term pages, you can simply use HTML comments to group the spellings together: <li>A color between blue and green. <!-- color colour -->

Within Item aliases, include the alternate spellings in parentheses, generally along with a field this way of referring to things is used in: color between blue and green (colour; arts)

If for some reason the matter of country spellings becomes a big problem where two countries both want the whole page in their own dialect, it is acceptable to create a second localized page for a particular dialect, such that if the main entry is Q6,18 (implying Q6,18/en) the localized entry might be Q6,18/en-AU. While MediaWiki's page language feature does not inherently support giving pages country-specific language codes, the multilingual alias box pattern is independent of this feature, meaning pages can be created for any dialect if editors deem it important.

Screen readers

Text-to-speech technologies and their text-reading "dialects" should always be included in the discussion of local language versus post-language. When possible, take any dubious page title, bit of markup, or unusual word and find a screen reader convenient to you to test it in. For page titles, you can do this before creating a page by simply opening up the empty page title. For page text, you may have to submit an edit before testing the page or fixing it. You are not obligated to instantly test every bit of text in existence on the wiki in ten screen readers, but if and when you see that some particular thing has actually become a problem in another screen reader it should be fixed. If disabled readers discover the problem before you do, allow them to provide a fix to the markup in the particular way they want, or alternatively, do not create fixes that are distinguishable from the proposed fix. There may be situations such as with Item color swatches where a fix needs to provide different functionality to both sighted users and screen readers or another alternate form of presentation such as a colorblind stylesheet; use your best judgement, but do not make the screen reader experience a worse experience.

Give source text readable names

The great advantage of Item titles being numbers is that in theory people can read a page full of statements in any language they like, as long as all the Items and Properties in the statements have been given labels in the language in question. The disadvantage of numbers is that in source text Item titles are not viewable in any language. As an imperfect solution to this, it is recommended you label each Ontology entry included by template with a comment in a natural language. Currently, most such numbers are labeled in English, because the multilingual mechanisms on the wiki have not been fully built and tested, and we do not entirely know whether the translation of each section within Item pages will take place on the same pages or parallel language-specific pages. If a section is transcluded onto all languages of a page, it should avoid having source text in English, or consistently in any specific language. If a section is specific to a particular page language, it may contain text in that language at will — including redirects into the Ontology namespace using that language — but if the language is not English it should not contain English phrases unless they would be used in that language. (In the Japanese language, for instance, a small handful of English phrases might be considered readable and would not have to be removed, but this might not be the case for other languages.) If pages are not differentiated and the easiest thing to do at the moment is to remove English, entities such as comics or role-playing games can be labeled in a language they were named in previously before later localization. Given an edge case such as a page with a subject originally named in English and three or four alternate languages, entities may be labeled in constructed languages such as Esperanto or Toki Pona at your discretion.

Place Items in meaningful numeric locations

when choosing a number for a new Item or Lexeme, attempt to put Items somewhere which will seem in retrospect like the most logical place to have put them. for instance, Items can be placed in a numeric location which directly references some characteristic of the Item, such as release year or the numbers of other similar works, or an Item can simply be placed referentially near blocks of other Items which resemble it. in some cases, it will make sense to place Items with similar concepts parallel to each other, such as The Taming of The Shrew (Q1590) and character tropes used within it or referencing it (Q3590-3591). as Item numbers increase from the thousands to the hundred-millions, these kinds of considerations will become less necessary and relevant, as no giant Item number will be inherently memorable. however, small Item numbers being somewhat recognizable versus others is important for cases such as referencing simpler concepts in more complex ones in fields such as the "consists of components" Property and Wavebuilder combinations sections. on a healthy wiki, contributors are going to discuss the titles of pages as well as paste them into other pages, and on any multilingual wiki or one which may be in the future, contributors are going to be discussing language-independent identifiers. furthermore, on a wiki that operates primarily from text pages and only secondarily from data Items, Item labels cannot be taken as seriously as they would on a pure Wikibase instance. because of this, Item numbers must be given at least some minimal amount of thought as if they were names. just as people recite "Pokémon 493" or "SCP-682" as the names of those things, to some degree every Item number on this wiki will count.

all of this stands slightly in contradiction to the notion that Item numbers are not language, but it is done out of necessity to try to tame the contradiction between hard notability requirements of certain things that cannot be included and nearly everything anyone can think of being added. at the end of the day, what is always present in a decision of what and what not to include? some things in spaces and other things not in those spaces. thus, any decision on whether something is notable enough "to be included right now" can be tempered by the arbitrary metric of how well it fits into a meaningful Item number versus something else. having a good Item number is not a hard requirement for anything; any "less-presentable" Item can always be added later. at the same time, using numbers to guide the inclusion of Items makes it easier to plan things such as the "U.S.S.R. process", in which Items are created in a scratchpad area and that particular chunk of Items is promoted to the main numbering when the work is finished or published. if Item numbers are handed out at the moment the Items make sense, put into official signifiers at the moment an unfilled name makes sense to be their name, then the process becomes less about deliberately excluding anything forever and more about giving things names and first giving names to especially-interesting things — or at least some tiny arbitrary subset of them that will fit within the limitations.

Swear words and offensive versus inoffensive communication

One of the major principles of the Lithographica ontology project is that the specific words people use to describe things in daily life or in philosophy texts do not actually matter; the network of concepts beneath language is the thing that matters. This is to say, the ontology project cannot outright ban rude words just for being the wrong words, and to some extent they must be allowed. At the same time, rude words go somewhat against the principle of labeling everything to be immediately comprehensible to newcomers. When people perceive collections of words as rude those words may not properly communicate the intended message. As a result, there are two kinds of pages or text areas within Lithographica: areas where a wide variety of rude words are technically allowed and areas where they are not, and where everything must be "sanitized" and "sterilized" to certain standards.

Thesis portals: Thesis portals are something of a free and open area meant to hold relatively unfiltered thoughts, with a few caveats. There is no requirement to use any particular kind of language within thesis portals, or censor thesis portals. Some thesis portals may choose to use censor bar markup or redact parts of entries for their own reasons, independent of any particular wiki-wide policy. One caveat with thesis portals is that their freedom is directly tied to them not being a social experience. Having a thesis portal and saying things on it does not entitle you to go to the ontology project and assert those things as universally true, especially if your attempts to prove them will lead to significant controversy. As well, if a thesis portal is deemed to be intentionally hateful as opposed to merely examining concepts of prejudice or violence without intending anything, that particular portal or subsection of a portal may end up being expelled. Thesis portals are for genuinely exploring a wide variety of concepts and possibilities, but they must fit the one criterion that as long as they exist in the form of an isolated text that people can choose to read or not read they do not harm anyone.

Item prototypes: If there are pages prototyping a series of Items without turning them into Ontology pages, these are considered essentially the same as thesis portals. When any part of them is transferred to Item Ontology pages, it should be revised to follow Item page rules.

Items in Ontology pages: These are considered the "polished" side of the project and obey post-language rules. An Item page should be maximally readable and understandable to as many people as possible regardless of their level of education, and it should avoid offending almost everybody, or failing that, the greatest number of people that is possible. Language is not required to specifically be "neutral" given the impossibility of such a thing in practice, but it should be possible for two people within an ideology rival to your own to explain to each other as an unobjectionable statement, such as if an anarchist has written a page that a Tory will explain to another Tory, or a Trotskyist will explain to another Trotskyist. Think of it this way: you must make all statements and terms inoffensive, but you can and should do it through attempting to make what you say objective to what anyone can observe and follow rather than merely following some arbitrary set of rules for what somebody told you is okay or inclusive. Do not be worried about post-language turning into a requirement to appease reactionary values. Facts that are accurate to real life do not have to be censored. Likely, the main reason you will have to revise a page for post-language is simply to iron specialized jargon and academic framings out of it while whatever progressive statements may be on it remain intact.

Item aliases: These are a special gray area. The label of an Item must be maximally presentable, but the alternate names of an Item can be almost anything which ordinary people say in common vernacular, in addition to academic jargon or any other register of language. This is to say, you can include swear words in alias fields as long as you use censor bar markup. Basically, the aliases field exists to aid people searching the ontology for a concept they have trouble naming, so if people are searching for an expression including a word such as "bullshit", or a concept which occasionally has that in one of its labels, then it should be in the aliases field. Put swear words in the aliases field and then continue down to the rest of the entry as if they weren't there.

It is important to distinguish between swear words and "swear-concepts". It is not words that are inherently offensive, but the concepts that words refer to, such as microaggressions against some particular subpopulation of people or kind of person. "Swear-concepts" with an intentional nature are not allowed inside Item pages regardless of what word they use, but if swear words become detached from their corresponding "swear-concept", such as somebody referring to a computer program as "being a bitch" yet somehow with this usage including absolutely no microaggressions or danger signs, it may be okay within thesis-portal and alias-field type areas. There may also be edge cases where if an entire Item or Term page is specifically about the existence of a particular "swear-concept" and how and why texts have decided to use it to upset people, it becomes okay to document prejudices themselves in order to tear them apart.

Additionally, it is worth remembering that something being allowed is not identical with it being encouraged. You can take from this fact what you will. Make thesis portals and ontologies with good content. If the flappy planes are in the stick towers just fine, it doesn't matter how they're labeled.

Defining concepts through operators

All the previous sections of this guide have addressed creating understandable body text and Item labels, but there is one more way of making Items understandable regardless of readers' specific language: defining concepts through semantic equations. Here, the tools introduced by Wikibase, the overall conceptual space of Semantic MediaWiki, and Wavebuilder (pronounced Wavebuilder) assist in creating definitions that transcend natural language to use at most a few generalized abstract concepts common to all languages and the definition of language itself.

The consists of components Property can be used to express the basic parts that are easily identifiable as part of a functioning whole. In some cases this will be the obvious divisions of something: United States government - consists of components - executive branch; legislative branch; judicial branch. In other cases this will include lists of claims about components of the Item having particular characteristics or functioning in particular ways: ThunderClan - consists of components - cat - case of - Warrior, ThunderClan - consists of components - ThunderClan territory, etc.

Wavebuilder (pronounced Wavebuilder) combinations can be used to express a range of different relationships that combine two concepts into a third concept. Some combinations represent simple structural relationships: signifier WITH signified PRODUCES sign. Other combinations represent physical interactions leading to causal events: draw deck WITH drawing a card PRODUCES Deck card moves to hand. Some combinations may be somewhat abstract: lion WITH eagle PRODUCES griffin. Some combinations may be abstract to the point of being described as "poetic": paper WITH hurricane PRODUCES disorganized ocean of papers. Overall, combinations with a literal explanation are preferred over combinations with a figurative explanation, although the major question to ask in any case is simply which combination has the best arguments or provides the most insight into the real world or defined hypothetical world the concepts come from.