Week12-My Wikipedia Edits of the Week  LYU YANGCHENG여양승2021008895




1. Summary of this week's edits

This week, I focused on organizing and expanding the entry "Friedrich Nietzsche and Free Will" in the Sandbox page. This is my first attempt to systematically disassemble and reconstruct philosophical concepts, especially to compare and analyze the abstract proposition of "free will" in combination with the thoughts of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This process not only challenges my logical organization, but also deepens my understanding of Wikipedia's language and entry structure.


In the design of the entry, I tried to establish a hierarchical content structure: including the introduction of the topic, Schopenhauer's views, Nietzsche's rebuttal, key concepts such as "physical freedom", "causal principle", "power of will" and "role of chance", so that readers can gradually understand the evolution of philosophical debates. This was also the first time I really realized that "writing an encyclopedia is not like writing an essay", but that you need to accurately embed knowledge links and academic citations in the entries.


2. New things I noticed

During the editing process, I found that the difficulty of philosophical articles is not only in understanding, but also in how to express them neutrally, popularly, and academically compatible. When I read Nietzsche in the past, I often used more poetic language, but when I put it into a Wikipedia entry, I had to translate it into a more neutral description. Especially for the multiple meanings of "freedom", such as "physical freedom" and "freedom of will" are easily misunderstood as repetitions. In fact, they are concepts of different levels in the philosophical context, which requires careful segmentation and examples to explain.


In addition, I also realized more deeply the necessity of academic citations this time: in order to avoid original research, I specifically checked several academic books and existing Wikipedia entries, and added reliable sources. This not only improves the verifiability of the entries, but also trains my ability to identify the authenticity of academic resources.


3. Discussion Questions

The question that made me think the most this week was: "In a field like philosophy with many polysemous terms, how to balance academicity and readability?" Philosophers often have different definitions of the same word, but the entries must provide a consistent framework; this made me understand that editing entries is actually a kind of translation work - translating concepts between different thinkers, and translating language between readers and theories.


I also reaffirmed during the process that there is a lot of room for improvement in the readability of Chinese Wikipedia articles. If the articles can pay attention to "teaching" in addition to being rigorous, it will be a win-win contribution for readers and the Wikipedia community.

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