Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
com·pen·di·um, NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. com·pen·di·ums or
com·pen·di·a (-d
-
) 1. A short, complete summary; an abstract. 2. A list or collection
of various items. ETYMOLOGY: Latin, a shortening, from compendere, to
weigh together : com-, com- + pendere, to weigh.
In other words, the word compendium implies some kind of distillation
or selection.
Indeed the definition implies some kind of information pruning, but
it doesn't help much, because there are different ways to prune. For
instance, I generally take it to mean that we don't want articles
that reproduce every bit of content in research papers; for instance,
the encyclopedia article just needs to say that "barracudas eat
mostly fish", while a paper will enumerate the percentages of each
food species found in an examination of stomach contents (yuck!).
Interestingly, it's extremely rare for anyone to complain that a
WP science article "has too much detail", even though some have
considerable depth; but perhaps no one has tested the situation
by importing a really large body of research verbatim.
An ironic thing about schools vs species is that I could write an
article about a species that has only ever been observed by one
scientist, has only one paper about it in an obscure journal, and
only one specimen in a jar somewhere, and yet no one would dream of
deleting the article for non-notability (in fact we have a number
of such articles already), while an article about the largest high
school in Cleveland would probably cause a furious VfD debate. Is
the obscure species, which is of interest to maybe a few dozen
specialists, really more notable than the high school and its
thousands of students?
Another interesting exercise is to look at the 1911 encyclopedia
articles. Hundreds of obscure personages of ancient Rome each
have their own article, carefully documented and cited, but there
is no article for Standard Oil; it is briefly described in
Rockefeller's bio, and under Trusts, but there is no encyclopedic
description of the company itself, and ditto for the many other
companies of the time. Despite the evidence all around them that
corporations had come to be a significant part of their world,
it seems that the 1911EBers had the idea that corporations were
somehow "unencyclopedic", and to us today it looks like an odd
oversight in Britannica's coverage.
So yes, there is a place for elision and summarization; but let's
not make the mistakes of our predecessors. Everything can be fixed
later, if need be.
Stan