On 13/10/2007, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)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 :-)
--
-Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.