Carcharoth wrote:
Can you remember which French encyclopedias did that elaborate scheme. It sounds interesting.
The difference with Wikipedia is the possibilities of linkage and transclusions and differing formats available in a digital encyclopedia, but the downside is the inconsistency in the solutions devised and discarded and reinvented over the years in an encyclopedia anyone can edit - it is sometimes difficult for consistency to emerge.
I agree that something driven by reader choice would be good, but still with editorial guidance.
I don't know about full volume length articles, but it's a plausible notion. More realistically, traditional encyclopedias took advantage of alphabetical order without regard to article size. Thus in the Espasa-Calpe "versión" is a 46 page article with all but the first three pages being about versions of the Bible. It is immediately preceded by a 3-line article about Versiola (a village in Italy with population 600), and followed by a two line dictionary definition of "versista". In the first edition of the EB 30 pages about "navigation" is preceded by two lines about the Mexican town of Navidad, and followed by "NAUMACHIA, in antiquity, a shew or spectacle among the ancient Romans, representing a sea-fight." The 12-volume "Smithsonian Scientific Series of the 1920s and 1930s does not call itself an encyclopedia and is not alphabetical, yet is encyclopedic in its coverage of science. Jeremy Collier's "Dictionary" from 1686 used an alphabetical arrangement, but is really encyclopedic in content. The long/short article volumes in the EB is very recent since it only started with the 15th edition.
"Wiki is not paper" is a great advantage for linking, and building other fantastic connections between articles, but does not handle stubs very well. Knowing when to merge a stub into a list is an art that must necessarily remain flexible. I don't believe that we should attach too much weight to consistency; that too easily becomes an obsession. I have no interest in working to make any article "good" or "featured"; if others want to take on that challenge they are welcome to do so. The vast majority of articles will still never make it there. That's fine! Consistency is the enemy of creative solutions. In the simplest case there may be two equally good ways of presenting a topic. Do we really need to insist that one way is better than the other for the sake of consistency. Perhaps in the distant future one may prove better than the other, but we cannot now prejudge that.
The readers' choice principle is fine as long as it does not impose reader's choice. The big drawback here is that a reader cannot choose what he does not know about. Personal experience has shown that I am in a minority when it comes to liking black jellybeans, though I find it annoying that the majority who selectively exclude black jellybeans deny me the experience of variety when they leave only the black jellybeans in the bowl. Some may want that black jellybeans be banned from assortments on the grounds that they are forced to pay for something they don't want. If that were to happen the people who buy assortments may never even know that black jellybeans exist.
Ec