[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is not a dictionary (was: Re: Old Wikipedia backups discovered)

[Anthony]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 5:10 AM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>> Interesting.  I came to accept the "Wikipedia is not a dictionary"
>> guideline/policy pretty soon after reading that page - and much to my
>> dismay I find it to be fairly widely ignored when it comes to
>> etymology, usage, and profanity.  I'm interested in seeing what the
>> original and/or newly rewritten language had to say about it.
>
> {{fact}}
>
> "Fairly widely ignored"? I see very few articles that could not be
> encyclopaedic.

What's very few?  Hundreds?  Thousands?  1%?  And what's "could not be
encyclopaedic"?

There are many articles about terms, phrases, slang, interjections,
adjectives, verbs, etc.  In most cases they could be turned into an
encyclopedia article - after all you can turn just about any topic
into an encyclopedia article - but they aren't encyclopedia articles,
they're long, well-written, interesting, dictionary entries.

> And, like Ian W points out, the policy is probably too
> strict anyway: a more seamless transition from encyclopaedia-space to
> dictionary-space would probably serve WMF's mission quite well.

That seems to be the prevalent attitude, which is exactly why I think
the policy is widely ignored.  If you make a dictionary entry which is
more than a few paragraphs long, suddenly it's accepted as an
encyclopedia article.

Maybe it's a good idea.  A with news articles in wikinews, Wikipedia
seems to do a better job at making dictionary entries than Wiktionary.
 But if that's what you want to do, at least make it explicit.

> Especially when you're talking about the etymology and usage of a
> word, there's a bit of a gap between the very terse etymology that
> Wikitonary allows, and the more flowing style found at Wikipedia.
> However, that more flowing style is only permitted in the context of
> *encyclopaedia* articles, so we have nothing like it for pure *word*
> articles.

Meh.

No, really.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meh