Citizendium Blog

Just a thought, about selectivity versus completeness, that recently came to me.

Back in the antique days of paper and binding and single authors, it was practically impossible to organize anything as large as Wikipedia, or as large as the Citizendium is likely to become.  What I describe as “strong collaboration,” too, was virtually impossible.  As a result, secondary scholarly works of all sorts that sum up what is known about a subject were usually relatively brief and relatively selective.  They left out a lot.  But scholars made a virtue of necessity: they said that the ability to be properly selective, to understand what and whose views are important, was a mark of expertise.  Now, this is true and I don’t mean to disagree with it.  But the alleged virtue of selectivity was, in many cases, not a virtue at all; taken as a virtue, it could be (and still is sometimes) used to excuse incompleteness and bias.

Strong collaboration, by contrast, creates what is, in some ways, a brand new expository virtue: completeness.  That’s the virtue of getting everything relevant about a subject down in words, and leaving nothing out (at a particular level of generality).  This too requires the virtue of selectivity, because sometimes some views have had so little impact that they don’t really deserve to be included in a complete exposition of a field.  But it also requires expertise in that there are many relatively obscure, but still important, papers and books and theories that are known virtually only by experts.  Still, completeness is a virtue that non-experts can frequently help with, because experts are apt to overlook discredited theories that, for their lack of fashion, still deserve some mention.