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