Talk:Interdisciplinary

Moved talk
This comment was moved from the article -- Lexor 09:55, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * This page has a strong emphasis on the natural sciences. It doesn't mention interdisciplinary fields in the social sciences/humanities, such as gender and sexuality studies or postcolonial studies. -- SJK

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This page has a lot of examples of what interdisciplinary fields are, but little on the benfits and costs of why someone would want to work in an interdisciplinary field.

Also this page redirects from interdisciplinary to Interdisciplinar[it]y, I think interdisciplinary is the best term, and the field of combining fields should be here in interdisciplinarity. Also no dictionaries I have consulted have a term for interdisciplinarity.
 * Incorrect - see below Bryan 16:36, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

ShaunMacPherson

I redirected Interdisciplinarity to Interdisciplinary and copied it verbatim in it's[sic] new home since, as far as I can tell, interdisciplinarity isn't a word in the dictionary. Please correct me if I am wrong.


 * Merriam-Webster: in·ter·dis·ci·plin·ar·i·ty   \ noun Also, from EB ("Education in the 20th Century"): " The system has resisted reforms calling for more uniformity in teacher status, changes in method and content orientation, teacher cooperation, interdisciplinarity, and technological familiarity."Bryan 16:36, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

New talk
This page was being redirected from interdisciplinar[it]y, a non existant[sic] word, so I moved the article here, to the correct spot.

Also this page has a lot of examples of what interdisciplinary fields are, but little on the benfits[sic] and costs of why someone would want to work in an interdisciplinary field.

ShaunMacPherson

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Hi!

Thanks for your message Lexor, I am not sure how to reply yet but I edited my talk page with my replies.

I wanted to add some information as to why people are involved with interdisciplinary fields. In political economy we are discussing this, why people bother to study it instead of economics + political science. The answer for it, and I think we should add to this article, is that people want the "big picture", focusing on one subject disregards valuable insights from the other areas, and narrow focus may lead to bias. A lot of this I posted in political economy as to why people study it,[sic] I will pull some of the ideas over to this chat and hopefully then into the article. If you have any ideas on political economy also please share them.

ShaunMacPherson

Interdisciplinarity
Shaun, interdisciplinarity passes the Google test, it's in several dictionaries, and it's well known to people in interdisciplinary fields. In addition, Wikipedia article names should be constructed from nouns, not adjectives (see Naming conventions. Accordingly, I am planning to undo your reversion. I will also try to address the question you posed above (it is a good question). Bryan 16:36, 18 November 2005 (UTC)