because it's actually quite relevant. The quality that the author is talking about is simply faith. Genuine intellectual activity is the recognition that there is a gap between how you understand the world and that there is is a more genuine degree of understanding to be found.
Because there's no guarantee of success the attitude one needs to adopt is the same attitude a believer needs to have, which is to take a leap of faith.
And like genuine faith, genuine intellectual activity is not goal oriented. If you only think to optimise your shopping list or make more money, you're impoverishing your own thinking by making it subject to what basically amounts some meaningless goal, that is to say you're instrumentalising thinking. Just like being faithful so you end up on God's or the churches good side is an impoverished version of belief.
The OP goes into some detail on the essentialness of honesty and integrity when it comes to inquiry. Without both, your pursuit of deep understanding will short-circuit. The best way I know to overlook truth is to willfully presume you know something, especially something unknowable. And that's faith. To exercise faith, you must stop questioning, shut your eyes, and jump into the abyss. You stop thinking. If some sort of understanding arises from faith, it most certainly is not the fruit of intellectual pursuit.
A bit late, but still so far best move of any US State. Originated myself in Central Europe and every day counts when I see the development in my home country and its neighbors!
This is beautiful, thanks. Why not linking the creatures to their English Wikipedia pages to get curious folks more background? Wikimedia Foundation employee here in private comment. Just learnt the first time about the Leatherback Sea Turtle here.
This kind of content reminds me of Microsoft Encarta. It would be really neat if there were lots of visualizations and interactive educational sites that shared many links to Wikipedia, and have them all compiled somewhere on some Wikimedia page.
Same here, after I wrote my comment, my next thought was what ways there could be enabled to have similar content on Wikimedia projects. The rules around Wikipedia projects (encyclopedic content, an article content narrated along an axis, as in meters here) and moderation are the hurdles from my POV.
But then again, maybe it's simpler/better to have folks taking free content, putting it in a narration on their sites and linking back to Wikipedia as part of distributed Web.
Wikimedia projects are not limited to strictly encyclopedic stuff. A visualization about the deep sea could easily be allowed on Wikiversity, which is intended for miscellaneous educational material that doesn't easily find its way elsewhere. The biggest obstacle would be technical.
