From: "Tony Sidaway" minorityreport@bluebottle.com
Actually on "one-line articles", my preference is for articles (or at least article intros) that can fit into the first screen. This is an internet encyclopedia and if you can't say something useful in the first paragraph then the reader will wander off to another site. If an article can be written well as a single sentence, I think that's a good thing--indeed an ideal to aim for.
"Article intros that can fit into the first screen." Oh, absolutely, by all means.
Now I'm going to pretend that I didn't read that key qualification and tear off onto a rant.
ARTICLES that can fit into one screen? No, no, no. That's not an encyclopedia, that's the Britannica MICROpaedia.
An encyclopedia is not about data, it's about knowledge.
An encyclopedia's job is to make knowledge _accessible_. An encyclopedia explains. An encyclopedia _instructs_. That's what the "-pedia" part is all about. An encyclopedia is supposed to synthesize and make sense of topics.
Why on earth does my public library's reference room even have an encyclopedia in it? (Several, in fact).
Why would anyone look up something in a twenty-volume encyclopedia when the library as a whole contains fifteen hundred times as many volumes? There probably isn't a single topic in the encyclopedia that isn't better dealt with in some standalone book. And it's just as easy for me to find that book in the library's computerized catalog as it is for me to open the encyclopedia's index.
So why do I use the library's encyclopedia?
Because the encyclopedia is selective, and because it synthesizes. Because when I don't want to read all the way through a 1,000 page book about the Bounty mutineers, it tells me about as much as I need and want to know.
Also, I know that the encyclopedia is going to present some broadly accepted mainstream view of the Bounty mutiny. If I just go to the history shelves, unless I first spend some time looking up book reviews, I won't know whether I'm reading a "standard" account or whether it's some kind of revisionist account with an axe to grind.
After I get _oriented_ by reading an encyclopedia article on the Bounty, or quadratic equations, or the history of jazz, then I'm ready to move on to the rest of the library.
(Now, the Micropaedia is about a third of the Britannica's total content. And a Micropaedia article is typically about, well, one screen. So, OK if someone wants to suggest that an appropriate balance for Wikipedia is for about a third of its content to be one-screen articles, OK).