Talk:Scholar (disambiguation)

will you please put more information about the word scholar in Wikipedia?

Would it be reasonable to set up a redirect for this article to 'Academic'?
The current page doesn't seem to say very much, it might be more useful to simply redirect to "Academic", which references 'scholar' anyway... Thoughts? - Ranglin 02:15, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
 * agree and will set about it Mayumashu 15:39, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Why do we need an article on scholars separate from the article on academia? This article appears to be purely a dictionary definition and etymology, and hence according to WP:NOT should probably be removed or moved to Wiktionary and redirected to academia. -- Rbellin|Talk 22:43, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Why is this page redirected at all? The conflation of scholarship with academia strikes me as a wholly unjustified procedure. There have been many scholars in history who were not affiliated, or only very loosely affiliated, with academic institutions. Ben Jonson was among the leading classical scholars of his age but had only a tenuous relationship with Oxford University. In the 21st century, one of the most famous and influential of all literary scholars is the late polymath Kenneth Burke, who never held a permanent position in a university and produced much of his work while employed outside the university. I happen to be an academician, but I strongly object to this redirection and suggest that it is incumbent on us to develop a historically informed definition of "scholarship" that recognizes the reality and the possibility that it is sometimes entirely or significantly independent of academic institutions. Finally, I can't help but noticing the irony that wikipedia is a scholarly resource produced by a mixture of professional and amateur scholars, some of whom have little or no academic credentials. By perpetuating the false stereotype that only academicians do scholarship, we are diminishing variety and significance of what constitutes scholarship. It is not the same thing as professionalization.--BenJonson 01:10, 4 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Please remember that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, so the right question to ask about the redirect is not "is scholarship identical with academia?" (obviously not), or whether the words are synonymous, but rather whether someone looking up "scholar" in an encyclopedia would be better served by a completely separate article on this marginally distinguishable topic, or by reading an already well-developed one on academia. Consolidating similar topics is a good idea; there's no need to fragment Wikipedia into a host of overlapping articles. -- Rbellin|Talk 01:43, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your response, Rbellin. When you say "Wikipedia is not a dictionary," that is my point exactly. Correct me if I am wrong, but is not wikipedia, in fact, an encyclopedia? An Encyclopedia is a historical document, that must reflect the history of the ideas it treats. It is simply not accurate, for the reasons stated above with illustrative examples, to fail to make the distinction between scholarship and academia. This is even more important, it seems to me, for an Encyclopedia than for a dictionary. I refer you, for example, to the 11th Encylopedia Brittanica (24:346), widely believed to be the most authoritative encyclopedia ever produced, and one of only a couple of the early Britannica's to still be regarded as an important reference by 21st century scholars. It contains an entry on scholar, scholarship, in addition to one on "academies." This is because the architects of the volume wished to preserve the traditional distinction for which I am arguing here:

The term 'scholar,' primarily meaning a 'learner', is secondarily applied to one who has thoroughly learnt all that 'the school' can teach him, one who by early training and constant self-culture has attained a certain maturity in precise and accurate knowledge....etc.

Although I appreciate the dialogue, nothing you have said convinces me that it is not entirely appropriate to include a seperate entry on this topic. To reduce the history of scholarship to the academy is to endorse a kind of provincialism that I think Wikipedia should eschew.--71.206.25.146 03:44, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

ThisMunkey (talk) 02:20, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Redirecting it to academia (which it was when I looked at it) doesnt provide any research for the term scholar. It should redirect to scholasticism or the academia category. The page academia does not reference the term scholar or scholasticism and probably isnt suitable for the history of scholasticism without providing the history of many other forms of schooling. The word multiply should not redirect to formulation even though multiplication is a sort of formulation (it redirects to mathematical multiplication).

redirect to Scholarly_method#Scholars
Even though the article now redirects to Scholarly_method#Scholars I have added a template box for Wiktionary for Scholar on Scholarly_method#Scholars —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.112.118.208 (talk) 10:44, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

That is good but if you went to the page for Tyrannosaurus Rex you would find 'kingdom' 'genus' etc. etc. Its one of the best parts on wikipedia. Ive often spent hours going through religion or animals through these links. Anything worthy of inclusion could be tagged like that I think. ThisMunkey (talk) 04:20, 4 February 2008 (UTC)