Guidelines:Topics

Normally, topic pages are created by the editors of the encyclopedia to ensure that each topic is properly classified as definitional, descriptive, or normative, that their central questions are formulated correctly, that topics are linked to correct parent topics, that their authors are correctly entered, etc. However, often topic pages are stubs, as they lack proper Prehistory, History, and Description sections. Authors of the encyclopedia can help to fill in these gaps.

Description

While the editors usually enter a few lines explaining the importance of the question, they don't normally illustrate the question with historical/hypothetical examples. This is where the authors can help. When editing the Description section of a topic page, try to answer the following questions:

• What makes this topic interesting or challenging?
• Why is the answer to this question not trivial?
• Can you given an example - historical or hypothetical?

If necessary, a diagram or two can be added to make the question as clear as possible.

Prehistory

This section is meant to describe how past philosophers and scientists dealt with the topic. For instance, the Prehistory section of Mechanism of Method Employment topic page outlines what some famous philosophers of science had to say on the topic of method employment. Specifically, the section summarizes the views of Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Dudley Shapere, Larry Laudan, etc. As a general rule, the classics of the philosophy of science are a great resource for this section. Also check the references cited in respective scientonomic literature.

This section has the potential to be the largest and least bounded, due to the fact that most scientonomic topics were originally discussed by the classics of philosophy of science. Yet, it is important to keep this section reasonably concise and only include those ideas that are directly relevant to the topic.

This section of the article will be collapsed upon a reader’s entry to the webpage, so they will have to click to expand this section if they want access to this pre-historical information on the subject.

History

The goal of this section is to outline developments in the topic within the scientonomic context. Large chunks of this section are generated by the encyclopedia automatically. This includes Acceptance Record, All Theories, Accepted Theories, and Suggested Modifications. Authors are only required to provide additional information if the automatically generated tables are not sufficient. Also, it is often helpful to provide a few line summary of the major transitions in our scientonomic views on the topic. For example, the History section of Mechanism of Method Employment topic page explains how Barseghyan's original formulation of the third law was deficient and came to be replaced by Sebastien's formulation. If there have been no changes on the topic in the scientonomic context, then it is quite likely that this section will be rather short. We anticipate in future years our accepted theories on any given topic will change, and thus the History section will serve its purpose of showing how these transitions took place.

Current View

By default this section re-state the currently accepted theory on the topic; this is generated by the system automatically from the acceptance record of the respective theory. Sometimes authors may want to add some additional content to the automatically generated content. Please only do so if there is an important piece of information not rendered automatically.

Related Articles

This section is meant to help direct readers of the encyclopedia to other relevant topics.

References

Please make sure to cite any references that you use, carefully following the citation guidelines.