Week13-My Wikipedia Edits of the Week LYUYANGCHENG여양승  




1. Summary of this week's editing

This week, I chose to edit the classic work "Truth and Method" by the German philosopher Gadamer. This is a philosophical work that has a profound impact on "hermeneutics", and its content involves philosophy, linguistics, literary understanding and basic methodology of the humanities. I mainly focused on the introduction, content summary and basic terminology of the entry, hoping to transform the obscure German philosophy into an entry style that readers can understand.


I tried to make the structure of the entry clearer, and emphasized the core idea of ​​"Truth and Method" in the content: **"Truth" is not only generated from scientific methods, but also realized through historical traditions, language understanding and dialogue. **For me, this is not just an editing experience, but also a philosophical learning journey.


2. New things I noticed

When organizing the entries, I noticed the following points:


The translation challenge was greater than expected: German words like "Geisteswissenschaften", "Verstehen", and "Horizontverschmelzung" have many possible Chinese translations. How to find a balance between "accuracy" and "readability" is the biggest difficulty in editing this week.


Wikipedia's requirements for citing sources are stricter than I thought. Many philosophy articles must be based on published books or academic papers even if the concepts are popular. They cannot be written based on intuition or "consensus".


The connectivity of the article is critical. If you don’t add internal links to related terms like “Heidegger”, “Schleiermacher”, and “hermeneutic circle” manually, it will be difficult for readers to extend their understanding. I gradually added these links and felt that Wikipedia is a huge knowledge network, not a pile of isolated articles.


3. Discussion Questions

The question I reflected on the most was: “Should philosophy articles be simplified? To what extent can they be simplified without distortion?” Philosophical originals are difficult to understand. Oversimplification will lose ideological tension, but if the original appearance is retained too much, it will discourage readers without a philosophy background.


I gradually understood that the role of Wikipedia entries is not to replace academic originals, but to build a bridge between readers and originals. A good entry can arouse curiosity and make people willing to read the original book "Truth and Method", which may be the real meaning of the entry.

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