How bout this?

A quasi dictionary loaded with commonly used (and therefore commonly referred to) Philosophical terms. Members of the message board would submit the definitions in a thread whereupon someone (admin, mod, volunteers?) puts them in order from time to time under one heading. Can also add brief bios on various (oft used) Philosophers of note as well as some explantions of other fields that you often see here at this site (evolution and Quantum mechanics are pretty dern popular).

At this point some of you may be asking why?

  1. Would help clarify discussions amongst the faithful as well as making discussions more open to the less initiated.

  2. As far as I know, a feature like this isn’t standard with other Philosophy boards. A resource such as this would serve to make this site more unique and user friendly.

  3. Avoids or cuts down on redundancy. Instead of having WhiteLotus repeat his interpretation of various German and Greek Philosophers ON EVERY THREAD, he can simply submit his interpretations as viable alternative definitions in one resource on site and can simply type, “see Kant: subsection 12, paragraph 4”, and so on.

  4. Accepted denotative definitions of terms increases overall understanding and will cut down on petty arguments over what something may or may not mean.

  5. If a small percentage of the user base contributes but a handful of terms and definitions each, the resource can be of respectable size and still easy to manage. This is the ‘it shouldn’t be that much work’ argument.

Thoughts and opinions?

Would a ‘canon’ as such lead to endless appeals to authority? Plus who would decide what was officially part of this database and what wasn’t? The editor(s) would potentially have too much influence.

dictionary.com

OR

Wikipedia

Wik’s search feature has been disabled (for the time being) and although I visit dictionary.com I gotta believe that there is a plethora of topics discussed here that are not covered there.

Alas, no biggy. Perhaps I will get around to starting a thread illustrating what I had intended.