After reading your email posted up to this mailing list, I have browsed the webpages provided in your email. I am suspicious about your accuracy on the comment concerning about encyclopedia having prescriptive articles.
I am writing to give you one very important point: the articles which contain definitions of words are from Wiktionary (URL: www.wiktionary.org http://www.wiktionary.org/ ), which is a branch project of the Wikimedia. Wikipedia is only providing a link to the webpage in Wiktionary. Therefore Wikipedia does not contain prescriptive articles as you accused. Although there are articles linked from the webpages containing lists in the Wikipedia itself, they are not giving definitions of the phrases. Even if it provides definitions of phrases, they are mostly in foreign languages other than English, thus it is difficult to find them from myriad of dictionaries. I cannot find a point to urge the community to delete the webpages.
Encyclopedia is a great collection of knowledge. Even if some content is not useful to particular person(s), there is no need to delete them unless they are not decent. There is not any sound reason to object knowledge accumulation.
Last but not least, please *read carefully before you make an accusation*. It is absolutely unwise to shout out complaints without sufficient proof to support them. You better look before you leap. Otherwise, you will be the one who is embarrassed if your naive, childish, and incomprehensive accusations finally light up the anger of the public.
Good luck to you if you are going to continue with such kind of behaviour.
Brian Chau
-----Original Message----- From: Guettarda [mailto:guettarda@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, July 31, 2006 6:11 AM To: English Wikipedia Subject: [WikiEN-l] Lists of words
It would appear that lists of words violate the provision that Wikipedia
should not have articles which define individual words, nor should it
include Lists of such definitions. However, we have
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_words ,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_slang and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_phrases , among others.
Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive. Is this policy still being applied
(in which case, *all* of these articles must be deleted), or not (in which
case the wording of the policy needs to be changed). I have raised the issue
at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Lists_of_W ords
I don't know if all of these articles need to be deleted, or whether policy
needs to be modified to reflect reality. But I think this needs to be
determined in general, not determined piecemeal
Ian