On 13/10/2007, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Ian Woollard wrote:
Don't encyclopaedias emphasise generality by their very nature and isn't generality a summary? And isn't a summary inherently relatively short?
Only encyclopedias that are explicitly trying to be general encyclopedias, and that have a physical limit to how many pages they can pack in.
Specialist encyclopedias can be extremely detailed. You could have an "Encyclopedia of North American Wildflowers", for example, and it'd have really specific and detailed articles.
Sure. But how many specialist encyclopedias are there? A book is typically a megabyte of text, and the wikipedia is already more like a gigabyte; we could swallow quite a few specialist encyclopedias whole without noticeably getting any bigger. In fact we probably already have or are well on the way, some bird encyclopedias may well be a subset of the wikipedia (to pick a random example).
And there is notability, we do tend to restrict ourselves; a lot of popular culture rightly or wrongly is being stamped out with great malice right now. (My guess is wrongly, but I don't particularly care that much.)
Encyclopedias that don't have a physical limit to how many pages they
can pack in could well take the same level of detail that specialist encyclopedias have and apply it to everything. There's no compelling reason I can think of not to.
I agree there's no physical limit. Perhaps the limit is in the definition: 'it's an encyclopaedia dammit!'
Since there haven't been a whole lot of
those until now, though, there aren't any examples one can point to and so people don't often think of the possibility.
In which case it won't make much difference, because there will be few edits.
I guess ultimately, the wikipedia can be looked at a bit like an economy. Economies grow by innovation. We've been riding the 'anybody can edit the wikipedia encyclopaedia' innovation.
Innovations usually follow a bell-shape curve. We would need a new innovation to avoid falling back down again, although the area under the curve will be the wikipedia, so there's no loss per se in falling back in terms of updates, and we will still doubtless end up with the worlds best general encyclopaedia- albeit a bit bereft of popular culture :-)