--- Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
I suspect our efforts are more likely to head in this direction at least for now, as the efforts to produce WikiReaders already show. I don't know if this path will lead us to the encyclopedia model of the past, or if we should encourage people to reconceive of the full encyclopedia as a collection of individual specialist encyclopedias.
That is in fact what Wikipedia already is. But the larger context is that those component encyclopedias must also fit in the general encyclopedia framework. Thus we have many different readerships to serve all at once. Use of summary style helps us accomplish this by allowing people to zoom to the level of detail they need while not forcing too much detail on those who need a more condensed version.
-- mav
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