On 6/3/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/3/06, Joe Anderson computerjoe.mailinglist@googlemail.com wrote:
However, four different viewpoints of the Wikipedia have emerged recently:
- It is an encyclopedia with a community
- It is a community with an encyclopedia
- It is an encyclopedia
- It is a community
Interesting. The dichotomy I most often see, that people have trouble deciding on, is :
- Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia
- Wikipedia is a project to create an encyclopaedia
It's probably more of a naming thing than anything else, but it does imply a point of view on whether the encyclopaedia has actually been created yet. Is the online version of Wikipedia an encyclopaedia, or is it a peek into a work in progress?
Steve
Depending on the context, the term "Wikipedia" is often used to describe each of those things. I suppose one could do a study to see what the predominant usage is. But this is mainly just a semantical argument. Obviously there are many documents served by the wikipedia.org domain which are not part of the encyclopedia itself.
The saying that "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a ___" is also used rhetorically to remind people using the resources provided under the wikipedia.org domain name to focus on the end goal - creating an encyclopedia.
There are a number of people who don't realize that the reason Wikipedia was created was to build and distribute a free encyclopedia. There are a smaller number that realize this and still want to change it. This latter group will most likely fail - there are way more people committed to sticking to the main goal.
Frankly, I don't think there are many (if any) people on this mailing list who don't agree that anything not related to building an encyclopedia should be kept off of *.wikipedia.org (with the possible exception of sep11.wikipedia.org which was sort of grandfathered in). I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think there's much of a dichotomy in the first place.
Anthony