On 29/12/2010, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
The point of our projects as a whole, is to provide information,; it is much more important to make the information easy to find so people will not miss it, even by their usual habit of relying on the google hit & not following even the most obvious of cross-references, rather than argue about which of two places to put it.
I think that ultimately this position is harmful. Information is extremely valuable, but putting things in the consistent places and generating and sticking to standards raises quality. As much as possible we want one, fairly obvious place to put each bit of information, not multiple places where they can be found, and doing that involves making clear-cut distinctions that we can explain to people.
WMF is trying to write reference works, not just collect piles of information (the internet does that). Being a reference work requires that they be capable of being referred to and classified according to some scheme that our policies outline.
It therefore helps to keep word articles separate from general concept articles in some way. It doesn't necessarily matter how you do it, provided there are standards for both. I don't think that words are concepts in the same way- or if they are, different languages have different concepts in that sense, and hence words are less general and less useful.
-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG