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

[Ian Woollard]

On 28/12/2010, David Levy <lifeisunfair at gmail.com> wrote:
> My point is that Wikipedia contains a great deal of content, handled
> in an encyclopedic manner, that traditional encyclopedias lack.  And
> some of these subjects are traditionally covered, with varying degrees
> of similarity, in other reference works.  But just as Wikipedia's
> inclusion of articles about television episodes doesn't make Wikipedia
> a TV almanac, its inclusion of articles about words doesn't make it a
> dictionary.

Mostly true, but on the other hand there is no way to add extended
dictionary articles in the Wikipedia in an encyclopedic way, whereas
you probably could with television episodes.

it simply can't be done.

For example even if you add all notable terms from all possible
languages, and relate them to the encyclopedic concepts, after you did
that, you could always look up those terms in a dictionary anyway, so
there's little point.

But right now the WMF doesn't have an encyclopedic dictionary, so if
we put those articles in the Wikipedia, and labelled them, and gave
them their own policies, then the people that want to write them will
be happy, and the people that want to read them won't learn much if
any encyclopedic information, but at least they'll know what they're
getting, whereas right now the Wikipedia is implying that they're
getting encyclopedic stuff, which they really aren't.

> --
> David Levy

-- 
-Ian Woollard