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

[David Levy]

I wrote:

> > The English Wikipedia contains individual articles about each
> > of the 144 "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" television episodes.
> > Can you give an example of that in a traditional encyclopedia?

Anthony replied:

> That might be a relevant question if we were discussing whether
> or not has television episode guide entries.  As it stands we're
> discussing whether or not it has dictionary entries.

My point is that each of those 144 "episode guide entries" is written
as an encyclopedia article (despite the fact that no traditional
encyclopedia includes such content).

Similarly, we have encyclopedia articles about words.  The fact that
these subjects traditionally aren't covered in encyclopedias and are
covered in other reference works doesn't automatically mean that their
presence in Wikipedia is purely duplicative of the latter's function.

> > As implicitly acknowledged in your question, Wikipedia isn't a
> > traditional encyclopedia.

> And that's my whole point.  Wikipedia *does* contain lots of
> dictionary entires, even though there is a page saying that it
> shouldn't.

Your opinion of what constitutes a "dictionary entry" differs from
that of the English Wikipedia community at large.

I certainly haven't seen the format in question used in any dictionary
(including Wiktionary).

> > > And if the concept is the word, shouldn't the title of the
> > > article be [[the word "meh"]]?

> > Why?

> Disambiguation.  I guess [["meh"]] would be acceptable, though.
> It's not so important with interjections, but any word which is
> a noun would suffer from the problem.  [[shithead]] should be
> about shitheads, not the word shithead, just like [[dog]] is
> about dogs, not the word dog.

We use the format "Foo (word)" or similar when the word itself is not
the primary topic.  For example, see "Man (word)".

Otherwise, titular disambiguation (the main function of which is
navigational, not informational) isn't needed.  A subject's basic
nature should be explained in its article's lead.

-- 
David Levy