Do we want something like topic challenges for philosophical works outside our bailiwick, to help alleviate the Western bias on the site?

Question

While reading the candidate profiles for the 2024 moderator election and the comments below them, I came across the following in a comment below one of the nominations (not mine):

I would hope that with ppl like you, religions have more space allowed here even if the western bias remains unaddressed.

Browsing through the questions and tags seems to confirm this bias. For example, we have questions tagged islamic-philosophy (30), confucius (22), taoism (40),chinese-philosophy (34) and with the enormously broad-sounding label eastern-philosophy (92 questions). These are small numbers compared to, say, bertrand-russell (163 questions), scientific-method (178), hume (176) or marx (133), to take just a few tags that I'm following. kant has 804 questions.

I would like to suggest topic challenges to help alleviate this. This has been tried before—see Weekly Topic Challenge from 2014—but the approach suggested at the time did not run long. What I am suggesting is an approach that has worked on Literature Stack Exchange and that would basically work as follows:

• Anyone can submit topic challenge suggestions that are not about Western philosophy. Ideally this would be a single philosopher or a single work.
• Other people in the Philosophy SE can upvote or downvote the suggestions, ideally based on how they get away from the current bias.
• Each month, we pick the highest-voted suggestion for the next challenge. If two or more suggestions are tied on votes, the oldest suggestion "wins", i.e. gets picked for the topic challenge.
• The next topic challenge is announced a month in advance. This is because some works may be a bit harder to get hold of (especially if you want them in print) and this time should not eat into the time for the challenge itself.
• The topic challenge runs for two months. This is because reading and understanding works of philosophy takes time and can't be rushed, and it is nice to be able to answer a question before the end of the challenge.
• Each topic challenge has its own meta post, like those over at Literature SE, with an answer where we keep track of the questions that get submitted.
• Participation is entirely voluntary. People can still post questions about other topics; they just won't be part of the topic challenge.

The above proposal is close to what we have been doing on Literature SE, with a smaller community than on this site. I am open to suggestions to modify this, e.g. making the challenges longer or shorter, or having just one topic challenge at a time (those on Literature SE overlap).

How do we move on from here?

• If most people who vote or respond here are in favour, we can just go ahead with it.
• If people would like a different format, we could create a different meta question to hammer out the details of the format.
• If most people don't like it ... well, then it won't happen.

Answer 1

The above proposal is close to what we have been doing on Literature SE

Philosophy is not like literature

I'd probably say it's more somewhere between politics and science.

Consider someone asking for politics questions outside of our "bias" of valuing equal rights (probably also relevant to philosophy), or science questions outside of our "bias" of considering the Earth to be a globe. I wouldn't approve of that for much the same reason I don't really approve of this.

Philosophy relates to what's reasonable to believe and what are good methods for evaluating claims, and it directly and indirectly relates to how we treat others (via moral philosophy, but also: beliefs inform actions and actions have consequences).

If someone wants to make a case for what's reasonable to believe or how to treat others under the lens of some Eastern philosophy, they're welcome to, but that should stand up by its own merits.

I don't really support actively encouraging people to research and share things about that, on this platform. But people can of course independently decide to do so, or collaborate to share it on a different platform (I recall the recent discussions about people wanting Chat to be used more often - I'd fully support a dedicated chat room for people who want to take part in such research and sharing, and I wouldn't entirely object if that results in the occasional Q&A about that popping up naturally, but it's a movement focused on getting people to ask questions about that which I have an issue with).

* I don't disagree that there's a "western bias", but that bias mostly seems to entail people adopting one bad idea above another bad idea. Rather than broadening people's perspectives to other bad ideas, I'd rather try to broaden their perspective to good ideas. (Of course I'm judging "good" and "bad" based on my own perspective.)

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I suppose one might consider whether one thinks of this site as closer to a collaborative philosophy textbook, or a study group, or as a public square. Textbooks should be more comprehensive, and probably study groups too. But I view this more as a public square, where people can stand up and share their perspective, but they're also open to ridicule (both subject to the format and rules of this site). Of course the Q&A format makes it very different from an open discussion (and also from a textbook or study group). But a big part of this is about sharing things to a wide audience, and it's far more subjective and impactful on people's lives than something like maths, to consider things shared publicly to be purely educational.

But that's just my 2 cents. Others might see things differently.