On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 5:10 AM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Anthony
<wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
Interesting. I came to accept the
"Wikipedia is not a dictionary"
guideline/policy pretty soon after reading that page - and much to my
dismay I find it to be fairly widely ignored when it comes to
etymology, usage, and profanity. I'm interested in seeing what the
original and/or newly rewritten language had to say about it.
{{fact}}
"Fairly widely ignored"? I see very few articles that could not be
encyclopaedic.
What's very few? Hundreds? Thousands? 1%? And what's "could not be
encyclopaedic"?
There are many articles about terms, phrases, slang, interjections,
adjectives, verbs, etc. In most cases they could be turned into an
encyclopedia article - after all you can turn just about any topic
into an encyclopedia article - but they aren't encyclopedia articles,
they're long, well-written, interesting, dictionary entries.
And, like Ian W points out, the policy is probably
too
strict anyway: a more seamless transition from encyclopaedia-space to
dictionary-space would probably serve WMF's mission quite well.
That seems to be the prevalent attitude, which is exactly why I think
the policy is widely ignored. If you make a dictionary entry which is
more than a few paragraphs long, suddenly it's accepted as an
encyclopedia article.
Maybe it's a good idea. A with news articles in wikinews, Wikipedia
seems to do a better job at making dictionary entries than Wiktionary.
But if that's what you want to do, at least make it explicit.
Especially when you're talking about the etymology
and usage of a
word, there's a bit of a gap between the very terse etymology that
Wikitonary allows, and the more flowing style found at Wikipedia.
However, that more flowing style is only permitted in the context of
*encyclopaedia* articles, so we have nothing like it for pure *word*
articles.
Meh.
No, really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meh