From: Michael Turley michael.turley@gmail.com
On 9/30/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
It depends on judgement, which we are supposed to exercise. There is a difference between the Wikipedia article on Harry Truman, and David McCullough's 1120 biography of Truman. Why not include every single
fact
found in McCullough's book? And from Brian Burnes's and Margaret
Truman's
and Ralph Keyes works, and Harry Truman's own autobiography as well? Because it is an encyclopedia article, and 3,000 page encyclopedia
articles,
even if broken up into hundreds of smaller sub-articles, aren't useful
to
the audience we are trying to serve.
If all of these works are broken up into smaller sub-articles, good editors will combine them into any number of different, useful and comprehensive articles that include all the knowledge that all of these works contain. In other words, every verifiable fact from David McCullough's book does not have to end up in the Harry Truman article, but there's no reason every verifiable fact should not be included in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is revolutionary and important because the level of detail captured is beyond that of any prior work. This is why many here enjoy Wikipedia more than any other reference. This is also why Wikipedia is gaining editors every day. The dominant cultural message is "Your knowledge is useful, please add it. We'll help you sort, organize, and present it." Filtering the input stream is helpful, as is merging data to appropriate locations, but to actively work against adding verifiable NPOV information is a fool's errand that can only lead to frustration in the long term.
The level of detail we *can* capture, and the level of detail we
*should*
capture, are two entirely different things. This is still intended to
be a
general purpose encyclopedia for a general audience. We are writing articles, not PhD dissertations, or multi-volume histories. Again,
there is
a reason why the History of England article does not contain the same
amount
of information as Churchill's four volume "A History of the English
Speaking
Peoples" that has nothing to do with "Wikipedia is not paper" and
everything
to do with "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia".
See my reply above for why I believe this is a specious argument. Our software-based encyclopedia is capable of presenting the general audience whatever level of detail that they choose to suit their interest. Just as there is a "History of Malta" link in the "Malta" article, we're capable of splitting articles as they become too large for the general "first view". I see no reason why this cannot continue to scale much further than it has.
Michael, Google.com states its mission as follows: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
How do you see that as differing from Wikipedia's mission? How do you think the end products should differ?
Jay.