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Revision as of 01:48, 28 January 2015

Personal information

My name is Daniel Eisenberg. I have a B.A. in Romance Languages from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in Spanish from Brown University. I was from 2000 to 2008 the editor of the journal Cervantes published by the Cervantes Society of America (http://cervantesjournal.com) or (https://web.archive.org/web/20140801155459/http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/cervante/bcsalist.htm). In 1976 I founded and until 1992 edited and published the Journal of Hispanic Philology. I was a Contributing Editor of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, published by Garland in 1990.

I was Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University, where I taught from 1974 to 1996. I am now retired.

You can find my personal page at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/ You can find my Vita (Résumé) there. My articles on homosexual topics are at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/INDEX-S.HTM, though an article from the "Encyclopedia of Medieval Iberia" is on my main page. Also there is a page on me in the Spanish Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes (http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/FichaAutor.html?Ref=2987). My email address at present (2014) is danielbeisenberg(at)gmail.com.

Correspondence and other papers of mine are found in the Florida State University archives (Special Collections, Strozier Library), and at the Hispanic Society of America.

Misplaced Pages's principles

The following are principles of Misplaced Pages which appeal to me very much. I have deduced these from people's behavior, though no doubt they are written somewhere, or somewheres.

It is totally democratic. No one is better than anyone else.
Work is recognized.
It is the most anarchic organization, and I mean that in a good sense, that I've ever heard of. No one rules. There are no elections. The people themselves set up the structure. (Curiously, the only country in which Anarchism has been a real political force was Spain.)
A principle is "don't assume the worst, assume the best".
Knowledge is an unqualified good.
If you know something, you'll probably want to share it. In fact, there's a subtle pressure on you to share what you know.
No field of knowledge is better than any other. It doesn't matter what crazy thing you're interested in, if it's significant, write it up.
This is more than an encyclopedia project.

Here are two things I don't like, or at least am ambiguous about:

The burden of ascertaining the truth of Misplaced Pages's contents has been offloaded to externals: journals' editors and editorial boards, newspaper editors, and the like. I don't know a better system, but journal editors, newspaper editors, etc., are not exempt from influences on: what is acceptable, what will sell more papers, what is "politically correct", what will lead to the editor's career success.
Misplaced Pages does not want original research. Because it would then have to set up a structure to determine whether the original research was correct.

The following addition of mine was reversed in the article "Campaign for 'Santorum' neologism" because it constituted original research:
"After Savage began his campaign, Santorum was never to win another election, although the extent to which Savage contributed to the defeats has not been studied."
The election results are public documents and easily accessible, but I had to find _someone else_ who had made this observation. This may be according to policy, but I don't think it's good policy if it prohibits this.

As we have seen in the case of computer viruses (originally there were none), there is something criminal, evil, or at least mean in human nature -- not in everyone, but certainly in some -- and that shows up in Misplaced Pages just like it does in other places. Yet there is lots of altruism too.

(This added later.) wikipedia's software is a delight. Fast, clean, and so intuitive! (That's a computer term for "makes sense" "easy to understand and use" "The command you think will probably work, it'll work.)

I would encourage everyone to read Criticism of Misplaced Pages and Misplaced Pages:Systemic bias.