Angela wrote:
On 5/24/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
there have been dozens of lengthy bibliographies published on [[George Washington]]'s life, and there's a wealth of other material out there, including scholarly debate on relatively minor points of his life; in principle, our treatment of him could include all this, expanding to the point where it consists of maybe 300-400 pages of text. Good idea? Bad idea?
I think this would be a bad idea. A core principle of Wikipedia is that it is an encyclopedia, and, despite the lack of size limitations, this principle should still lead us to aim at something which is closer to a traditional encyclopedia than to a text book, biography, or any other other form of resource. It may, however, have a place within Wikibooks.
That's my own intuition, but I have trouble figuring out how to actually distinguish between what we do now and that eventuality. I'm not altogether *sure* it's a bad idea either, especially if things can be broken down into useful chunks. For example, [[George Washington at blah]] or [[Controversy over the color of George Washington's slippers]]. I mean, if we collated all our Pokemon-related pages (pardon the obvious example), we probably have a small books' worth of material written on Pokemon already...
-Mark