On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Anthony wikimail@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. 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.
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.
Steve