On 10/15/05, Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Oct 15, 2005, at 4:22 AM, charles matthews wrote:
I mean, 'populist' is _not_ necessarily well written. Jimbo's point about the Gates and Fonda articles was not that that they were arcane and highbrow, but that they were done in such a poor style that you wouldn't want to tread in them, let alone read in them.
Which is why I didn't simply append this to Jimbo's discussion - it is a separate one. This isn't just a matter of writing style - it' a matter of focus. As a general encyclopedia, we need to be targetted at a general audience - that means that, if nothing else, what the New York Times identifies as major events in someone's life are, for our purposes, major events. I'm not saying those are the only ones worth paying attention to - but then, I'd support an article on each of Derrida's publications, so I'm not worried, in the big picture, about crowding out the academic stuff. I don't think Cambridge and de Man should be the main focus of the article at all. I do think they each need their little sections, and that it would be irresponsible of us to exclude them.
Is Wikipedia simply a general encyclopedia? I always thought it was more than that. I think the goal is really to include general information and specific information, and let the user navigate easily between the two. Maybe I'm wrong about this, though. It's an interesting question.
-Snowspinner
Anthony