I couldn't agree more. As encyclopedia writers change,
their ideas of notability change. We must not allow
our points of view to determine what information is
available to others.
Mark
--- Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
com�pen�di�um, NOUN: Inflected forms: pl.
com�pen�di�ums or
com�pen�di�a (-d
-
) 1. A short, complete summary; an abstract. 2. A
list or collection
of various items. ETYMOLOGY: Latin, a shortening,
from compendere, to
weigh together : com-, com- + pendere, to
weigh.
In other words, the word compendium implies some
kind of distillation
or selection.
Indeed the definition implies some kind of
information pruning, but
it doesn't help much, because there are different
ways to prune. For
instance, I generally take it to mean that we don't
want articles
that reproduce every bit of content in research
papers; for instance,
the encyclopedia article just needs to say that
"barracudas eat
mostly fish", while a paper will enumerate the
percentages of each
food species found in an examination of stomach
contents (yuck!).
Interestingly, it's extremely rare for anyone to
complain that a
WP science article "has too much detail", even
though some have
considerable depth; but perhaps no one has tested
the situation
by importing a really large body of research
verbatim.
An ironic thing about schools vs species is that I
could write an
article about a species that has only ever been
observed by one
scientist, has only one paper about it in an obscure
journal, and
only one specimen in a jar somewhere, and yet no one
would dream of
deleting the article for non-notability (in fact we
have a number
of such articles already), while an article about
the largest high
school in Cleveland would probably cause a furious
VfD debate. Is
the obscure species, which is of interest to maybe a
few dozen
specialists, really more notable than the high
school and its
thousands of students?
Another interesting exercise is to look at the 1911
encyclopedia
articles. Hundreds of obscure personages of ancient
Rome each
have their own article, carefully documented and
cited, but there
is no article for Standard Oil; it is briefly
described in
Rockefeller's bio, and under Trusts, but there is no
encyclopedic
description of the company itself, and ditto for the
many other
companies of the time. Despite the evidence all
around them that
corporations had come to be a significant part of
their world,
it seems that the 1911EBers had the idea that
corporations were
somehow "unencyclopedic", and to us today it looks
like an odd
oversight in Britannica's coverage.
So yes, there is a place for elision and
summarization; but let's
not make the mistakes of our predecessors.
Everything can be fixed
later, if need be.
Stan
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