On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 11:25 AM, David Levy <lifeisunfair(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I wrote:
> The English Wikipedia contains individual
articles about each
> of the 144 "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" television episodes.
> Can you give an example of that in a traditional encyclopedia?
Anthony replied:
That might be a relevant question if we were
discussing whether
or not has television episode guide entries. As it stands we're
discussing whether or not it has dictionary entries.
My point is that each of those 144 "episode guide entries" is written
as an encyclopedia article (despite the fact that no traditional
encyclopedia includes such content).
That point is not relevant, though.
Similarly, we have encyclopedia articles about words.
The fact that
these subjects traditionally aren't covered in encyclopedias and are
covered in other reference works doesn't automatically mean that their
presence in Wikipedia is purely duplicative of the latter's function.
What makes something an "encyclopedia article about a word"? Sounds
to me like another way to describe a "dictionary".
> As
implicitly acknowledged in your question, Wikipedia isn't a
> traditional encyclopedia.
And that's my whole point. Wikipedia *does*
contain lots of
dictionary entires, even though there is a page saying that it
shouldn't.
Your opinion of what constitutes a "dictionary entry" differs from
that of the English Wikipedia community at large.
I certainly haven't seen the format in question used in any dictionary
(including Wiktionary).
So "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" is a formatting guideline, and not
an inclusion guideline? I didn't take it that way, but if you think
that's what it says, maybe I should reread it.
> > And
if the concept is the word, shouldn't the title of the
> > article be [[the word "meh"]]?
> Why?
Disambiguation. I guess [["meh"]]
would be acceptable, though.
It's not so important with interjections, but any word which is
a noun would suffer from the problem. [[shithead]] should be
about shitheads, not the word shithead, just like [[dog]] is
about dogs, not the word dog.
We use the format "Foo (word)" or similar when the word itself is not
the primary topic. For example, see "Man (word)".
I guess that could work, though it would be nice to have something
more standard. Instead I see:
*troll (gay slang)
*faggot (slang)
*Harry (derogatory term)
*Oorah (Marines)
*Uh-oh (expression)
Anyway, not that big a deal. So the next problem I have is that there
don't seem to be any notability guidelines. Is the word "computer"
notable? If so, why isn't there yet an encyclopedia entry for such a
common word? There's certainly quite a lot that can be said about the
word.
And I guess if "Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary" is more
explicit about being a formatting guideline, and not an inclusion
guideline, that would then reflect the de facto policy.