Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:
- They are secondary source works
This means that original research and criticism doesn't belong. To me, that means that material should really be sourced back to topical surveys rather than original documents, because of the need for balance. Therefore, for example, in areas of music, art, literature, theater, and film, we should be drawing to a considerable degree from the reviews and criticism written by other authorities rather than doing our own. For an encyclopedic article, the ideal footnote for an article about a film is not the film itself, but rather a book or magazine article about the film. This, among other things, helps with NPOV, and makes sure that we are a summary of human knowledge rather than having a strange and wonderful new perspective on something.
WP is flawed because [[Arachnophobia (movie)]] doesn't quote a film critic's opinion about it? That's a pretty strange criterion for quality.
- They are edited for a certain uniformity of style and content across
articles;
I believe that this remains the largest problem area, encyclopedically speaking. We lack uniformity across articles. Now, some of this will naturally improve with time, but it will never totally correct itself without greater effort. The various & sundry WikiProjects have helped enormously with this, and those who have participated are to be commended. However, this is where there should be some judicious merging and editing of some of the overdone contemporary culture articles, and where the unencyclopedic articles should be dropped so that the criteria for inclusion are reasonably uniform. Without getting into disputed ground, it is fair to say that we need to have more on Dominco Scarlatti than on Phish; more on J.S. Bach than F. Joseph Haydn; and at least as much on John Steinbeck as J.R.R. Tolkien. What we have instead is the mantra of Wikipedia Is Not Paper which, while true, has undermined any sort of effort for consistency of treatment.
Ah-ha, the tautological "unencyclopedic" gives you away. You want to make people write about what you think is the "important" stuff, and ignore the "unimportant". If none of the thousands of Wikipedia editors see any point in writing about Scarlatti or Steinbeck, that maybe tells you something about how much they really matter. I've read both Steinbeck and Tolkien, and Tolkien works on 20th-century readers in a way that Steinbeck never will. Editorial boards dictating the length and content of articles according to the biases of the literary etc establishments just end up with those biases enshrined in the encyclopedia, where they trick the gullible into taking those biases as Truth.
- They cover topics that in nearly all cases can be checked and
researched further in any undergraduate college library
Many of the affectatious articles added on whims cannot; persons with local and ephemeral fame cannot be researched outside of the area where they were prominent, nor can obscure pop culture figures from decades past.
Sure they can. There are a lot of books out there. Take any article title and search for it in Amazon, and of course Google will usually yield thousands of hits, and many of those websites refer to good primary sources. The manual labor of typing in references is mind-numbing and errorprone though, and I've been thinking about adding a [[Book:]] namespace that could be mass-generated and easy to add refs to from articles.
Stan