Quoting David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>:
On 16/12/2007, joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu
<joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu> wrote:
Quoting David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>:
> * Mainly that they're inappropriate to
an encyclopedia.
This is an argument I find less than compelling.
Are schools not
encyclopedic?
Is having articles on every two-bit band that meets [[WP:MUSIC]]
appropriate to
an encyclopedia? We all have our different intuitions about what an
encyclopedia
should have in it. One thing is clear: Wikipedia is not a traditional
encyclopedia.
What you're talking about there is range of coverage - spoiler
warnings is a question of style of coverage. So whether a topic is
covered at all doesn't address that.
I guess I lied slightly when I said my last message was going to be my last on
the topic. The point I was trying to make was the in general notions of what
are appropriate to a traditional encyclopedia don't in general sit well with
Wikipedia. (A traditional encyclopedia isn't editable by random people and
doesn't have a history of every edit and an associated talk page etc.). And
given that one thing we certainly do have is more detail about plots and such
than a traditional encyclopedia. And as I see it at least, if we are going to
have more content than a traditional encyclopedia all the more so we shouldn't
be bound by the standard stylistic conventions and in fact we are not. For
example, what standard encyclopedia has banner warnings about neutrality or
{{fact}} tags. We should care about what will work best and what will help the
project the most, not what EB or anyone else would do in this situation. We're
beating EB by being Wikipedia. There's no need to handicap ourselves by
slavishly imitating our predecessors.