On 7/12/05, Karl A. Krueger kkrueger@whoi.edu wrote:
On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 01:15:42PM -0000, Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:
Starting from when I was a small child reading them on the living room floor, I've never fully grasped the reasons why an encyclopedia was not just a superset of the dictionary.
[snip]But an encyclopedia tries to be somewhat independent of all this. It tries to split the world up into concepts that make sense from the point of view of our current state of knowledge. Those tails that have enough in common to be usefully described together should form one article, both in an English encyclopedia and an Icelandic one.
Maybe. But while the structure of our language might not overwhelmingly determine the thoughts that we can have in it (the infamous Sapir-Whorf conjecture) it certainly determines which thoughts are easier to communicate to readers of the same language.
It seems to me that the central difference between a dictionary and an encyclopedia is that a dictionary is about the language, whereas an encyclopedia is about the world. A dictionary sets out not to describe the world in which language-users live, but rather the language that they use to describe that world. So a dictionary entry on the words "God" or "justice" does not need to discuss the issue of whether God exists, or whether justice can be accomplished -- only with what people _mean_ when they say or write "God" or "justice".
A dictionary uses language as meta-language: that is, to describe the language itself. An encyclopedia uses language in the ordinary fashion: to describe the world.
Since languages are part of the greater world around them, and words are parts of that world, I still think encyclopedias that do not incorporate dictionaries are falling a little short of what they could be.
In your example of a "frog", the dicdef could be the disambiguation page that leads to the encyclopedic discussion of the amphibian, the slang term for a French person, and even the use as a clothes fastener. Every word would be defined, and those with further specific use would be simply have a larger article, or have several child articles linked under them.
We already start many (perhaps even most) articles with a definition of the term being discussed. The primary difference I see is that some of these "header definitions" could better serve the readers as less specific disambiguation pages.
Although "frog" isn't the best example (and I can't think of a better one on the spot right now), why *wouldn't* we present someone looking up "frog" with the pronunciation and etymology of the word, along with three branches to follow for a fuller explanation? Isn't this much better than having articles "Frog", "Frog (slang)" and "Frog (fastener)" whose title only offers the barest description of what to expect from the link?
The word is part and parcel of the overall value of the named concept in the world, and therefore is also encyclopedic. Encyclopedic phrases that define a concept don't belong in a dictionary, but I don't see a valid opposite corollary.
I still see a dictionary as a subset of a "true" encyclopedia. I suspect that this hasn't been considered for adoption as part of the larger goal of Wikipedia in part because it is far more difficult (and usually less interesting) to accomplish than producing encyclopedia articles.
I don't know for sure where the "not a dictionary" part of [[WP:NOT]] came from, but suspect it came from Mr. Wales. I'd be interested to know *why* being a superset of a dictionary is so taboo.