On 15/09/05, dpbsmith@verizon.net dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
I thought that there was consensus that Wikipedia a) is an encyclopedia, and b) is not "an indiscriminate collection of information."
I must say, I'm sure I've read: "Imagine a world where every single person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. We don't have to imagine it. We're doing it" attributed to Jimbo, and I have never squared that with "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information."
Personally, I don't mind indiscriminate information - that's what the whole world wide web is. Search engines like Google have made it their mission to make it usable, and I don't see why Wikipedia need be any different in our little web-within-the-web. (Tagging - which is what our categorisation could be seen as - seems to be the other approach, but as far as I can tell that's more hype than useful).
Dan