"Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com wrote in message news:b8ceeef70908230910h3466019cpcedf7ae0a2c0a98b@mail.gmail.com...
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 1:17 AM, Bod Notbodbodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:
I'd really hate to go to [[curry]] and see recipes. The sorts of spices that are often included yes. But not cooking times.
If I look up [[engine]] I want to know how it functions. But I don't want to see a tutorial on how to deal with specific problems.
Although I suppose there's a possible claim of hypocrisy here. Many of our medical articles include a section on treatment, which I guess is a form of How To.
And I just happened upon [[suicide methods]] which perhaps is the last word, almost literally, on How To do something.
I think the difference is between instructions with the expectation that someone would actually follow them, and simply understanding common practice.
Curry recipe: you don't need precise cooking times, sequences etc to understand common practice. Engine: You don't need troubleshooting instructions to understand common practice. Disease: A description of treatment *is* appropriate to understand common practice.
I agree. Sometimes doctors do not hav time to describe exactly what they will do, because they're concentrating on minute details, like angiograms, and it is useful to hav a cursory description of a medical procedure, so patients can compare or deliver informed consent. Nobody will put a step by step process for a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commisurotomy into the encyclopedia.
Suicide methods: It's a fine line, but there is probably information you can leave out without affecting the encyclopaedicness. For example, we could explain that people take certain kinds of pills without being too specific. We could mention that people jump off buildings without highlighting particular ones. Maybe.
Steve
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