From: John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com
vanity page? A page written by someone seeking glorification? But, why, Isn't Wikipedia supposed to be a compendium of human knowledge?
Let's take a little tour through the dictionary. I'm going to use AHD4 (running the risk of being trumped by people with access to the full OED) but, here goes. com·pen·di·um, NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. com·pen·di·ums or com·pen·di·a (-d
-
) 1. A short, complete summary; an abstract. 2. A list or collection of various items. ETYMOLOGY: Latin, a shortening, from compendere, to weigh together : com-, com- + pendere, to weigh.
In other words, the word compendium implies some kind of distillation or selection.
en·cy·clo·pe·di·a A comprehensive reference work containing articles on a wide range of subjects or on numerous aspects of a particular field, usually arranged alphabetically. ETYMOLOGY:Medieval Latin encyclopaedia, general education course, from alteration of Greek enkuklios paideia, general education : enkuklios, circular, general; see encyclical + paideia, education (from pais, paid-, child; see pau- in Appendix I). WORD HISTORY: The word encyclopedia, which to us usually means a large set of books, descends from a phrase that involved coming to grips with the contents of such books. The Greek phrase is enkuklios paideia, made up of enkuklios, “cyclical, periodic, ordinary,” and paideia, “education,” and meaning “general education.” Copyists of Latin manuscripts took this phrase to be a single Greek word, enkuklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the New Latin word encyclopaedia, coming into English with the sense “general course of instruction,” first recorded in 1531. In New Latin the word was chosen as the title of a reference work covering all knowledge. The first such use in English is recorded in 1644.
In the case of what an encyclopedia is supposed to cover, things are less clear, but there is a strong implication that it has something to do with education or teaching or school. Encyclopedias don't cover everything, they cover "book-larning." They have some vague connection (not ironical here) with the idea of being a universal _textbook,_ covering those areas relevant to a _general education_.
Now, compendium of human _knowledge:_
knowl·edge 1. The state or fact of knowing. 2. Familiarity, awareness, or understanding gained through experience or study. 3. The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned. 4. Learning; erudition: teachers of great knowledge. 5. Specific information about something. 6. Carnal knowledge.
I think we can agree that "universal compendium of human knowledge" is not referring to meaning number #6. Inclusionists seem to feel that it ought to mean #3, "The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned." But I think there is often an understanding that knowledge, _in the context of an encyclopedia,_ has meaning number #4. In other words, book-larning.
Naturally, we extend this quite a bit, for a number of reasons. Paper publishers are quite happy to publish an "encyclopedia of baseball" or an "encyclopedia of vaudeville" and Microsoft has published an "MS-DOS encyclopedia," and we include material of this kind in Wikipedia.
However, business directories, gazetteers, Who's Who, and the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac are _never_ called the "encyclopedias of businesses," "encyclopedias of place names," "the Marquis Encyclopedia of Vanity Pages," or the "Encyclopedia of Ephemeral Astronomical Data Useful for Navigation."
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
So, to try to avoid the constant posturing for a while, how does this help us to navigate the different understandings of what should and should not go in? Are you in favour or against schools, for example? I can't really tell from your message.
It would seem that your definition would exclude many RamBot articles?
Mark
--- "Daniel P.B.Smith" dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
From: John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com
vanity page? A page written by someone seeking
glorification? But, why,
Isn't Wikipedia supposed to be a compendium of human knowledge?
Let's take a little tour through the dictionary. I'm going to use AHD4 (running the risk of being trumped by people with access to the full OED) but, here goes. com�pen�di�um, NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. com�pen�di�ums or com�pen�di�a (-d> -> ) 1. A short, complete summary;
an abstract. 2. A
list or collection of various items. ETYMOLOGY: Latin, a shortening, from compendere, to weigh together : com-, com- + pendere, to weigh.
In other words, the word compendium implies some kind of distillation or selection.
en�cy�clo�pe�di�a A comprehensive reference work containing articles on a wide range of subjects or on numerous aspects of a particular field, usually arranged alphabetically. ETYMOLOGY:Medieval Latin encyclopaedia, general education course, from alteration of Greek enkuklios paideia, general education : enkuklios, circular, general; see encyclical + paideia, education (from pais, paid-, child; see pau- in Appendix I). WORD HISTORY: The word encyclopedia, which to us usually means a large set of books, descends from a phrase that involved coming to grips with the contents of such books. The Greek phrase is enkuklios paideia, made up of enkuklios, �cyclical, periodic, ordinary,� and paideia, �education,� and meaning �general education.� Copyists of Latin manuscripts took this phrase to be a single Greek word, enkuklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the New Latin word encyclopaedia, coming into English with the sense �general course of instruction,� first recorded in 1531. In New Latin the word was chosen as the title of a reference work covering all knowledge. The first such use in English is recorded in 1644.
In the case of what an encyclopedia is supposed to cover, things are less clear, but there is a strong implication that it has something to do with education or teaching or school. Encyclopedias don't cover everything, they cover "book-larning." They have some vague connection (not ironical here) with the idea of being a universal _textbook,_ covering those areas relevant to a _general education_.
Now, compendium of human _knowledge:_
knowl�edge 1. The state or fact of knowing. 2. Familiarity, awareness, or understanding gained through experience or study. 3. The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned. 4. Learning; erudition: teachers of great knowledge. 5. Specific information about something. 6. Carnal knowledge.
I think we can agree that "universal compendium of human knowledge" is not referring to meaning number #6. Inclusionists seem to feel that it ought to mean #3, "The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned." But I think there is often an understanding that knowledge, _in the context of an encyclopedia,_ has meaning number #4. In other words, book-larning.
Naturally, we extend this quite a bit, for a number of reasons. Paper publishers are quite happy to publish an "encyclopedia of baseball" or an "encyclopedia of vaudeville" and Microsoft has published an "MS-DOS encyclopedia," and we include material of this kind in Wikipedia.
However, business directories, gazetteers, Who's Who, and the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac are _never_ called the "encyclopedias of businesses," "encyclopedias of place names," "the Marquis Encyclopedia of Vanity Pages," or the "Encyclopedia of Ephemeral Astronomical Data Useful for Navigation."
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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On Friday, October 29, 2004 23:41, Daniel P.B. Smith wrote:
From: John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com
vanity page? A page written by someone seeking glorification? But, why, Isn't Wikipedia supposed to be a compendium of human knowledge?
Let's take a little tour through the dictionary. I'm going to use AHD4 (running the risk of being trumped by people with access to the full OED) but, here goes.
com.pen.di.um, NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. com.pen.di.ums or com.pen.di.a (-d
Well you /did/ ask to be trumped:
The OED's online version (sans quotations and the date charts) has:
compendium
(k{schwa}m{sm}p{ope}nd{shti}{schwa}m)
Pl. -ums, -a.
[a. L. compendium that which is weighed together, a sparing, saving, abbreviation, f. compend-{ebreve}re to weigh together, f. com- + pend{ebreve}re to weigh.]
{dag} 1. A short cut; 'the near way' (J.).
2. a. An abridgement or condensation of a larger work or treatise, giving the sense and substance, within smaller compass.
b. An epitome, a summary, a brief.
c. transf. and fig. A condensed representation, an embodiment in miniature; an abstract.
d. An abbreviation whereby two or more letters are expressed by a single character.
{dag} 3. Sparing or saving; economy of labour, space, etc. Obs.
4. a. A box, etc., containing or comprising several different games.
b. A package of the stationery required for letter-writing.
HTH. ;-)
Yours,
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
com·pen·di·um, NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. com·pen·di·ums or com·pen·di·a (-d
) 1. A short, complete summary; an abstract. 2. A list or collection of various items. ETYMOLOGY: Latin, a shortening, from compendere, to weigh together : com-, com- + pendere, to weigh.
In other words, the word compendium implies some kind of distillation or selection.
Indeed the definition implies some kind of information pruning, but it doesn't help much, because there are different ways to prune. For instance, I generally take it to mean that we don't want articles that reproduce every bit of content in research papers; for instance, the encyclopedia article just needs to say that "barracudas eat mostly fish", while a paper will enumerate the percentages of each food species found in an examination of stomach contents (yuck!). Interestingly, it's extremely rare for anyone to complain that a WP science article "has too much detail", even though some have considerable depth; but perhaps no one has tested the situation by importing a really large body of research verbatim.
An ironic thing about schools vs species is that I could write an article about a species that has only ever been observed by one scientist, has only one paper about it in an obscure journal, and only one specimen in a jar somewhere, and yet no one would dream of deleting the article for non-notability (in fact we have a number of such articles already), while an article about the largest high school in Cleveland would probably cause a furious VfD debate. Is the obscure species, which is of interest to maybe a few dozen specialists, really more notable than the high school and its thousands of students?
Another interesting exercise is to look at the 1911 encyclopedia articles. Hundreds of obscure personages of ancient Rome each have their own article, carefully documented and cited, but there is no article for Standard Oil; it is briefly described in Rockefeller's bio, and under Trusts, but there is no encyclopedic description of the company itself, and ditto for the many other companies of the time. Despite the evidence all around them that corporations had come to be a significant part of their world, it seems that the 1911EBers had the idea that corporations were somehow "unencyclopedic", and to us today it looks like an odd oversight in Britannica's coverage.
So yes, there is a place for elision and summarization; but let's not make the mistakes of our predecessors. Everything can be fixed later, if need be.
Stan
I couldn't agree more. As encyclopedia writers change, their ideas of notability change. We must not allow our points of view to determine what information is available to others. Mark
--- Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
com�pen�di�um, NOUN: Inflected forms: pl.
com�pen�di�ums or
com�pen�di�a (-d
) 1. A short, complete summary; an abstract. 2. A
list or collection
of various items. ETYMOLOGY: Latin, a shortening,
from compendere, to
weigh together : com-, com- + pendere, to weigh.
In other words, the word compendium implies some
kind of distillation
or selection.
Indeed the definition implies some kind of information pruning, but it doesn't help much, because there are different ways to prune. For instance, I generally take it to mean that we don't want articles that reproduce every bit of content in research papers; for instance, the encyclopedia article just needs to say that "barracudas eat mostly fish", while a paper will enumerate the percentages of each food species found in an examination of stomach contents (yuck!). Interestingly, it's extremely rare for anyone to complain that a WP science article "has too much detail", even though some have considerable depth; but perhaps no one has tested the situation by importing a really large body of research verbatim.
An ironic thing about schools vs species is that I could write an article about a species that has only ever been observed by one scientist, has only one paper about it in an obscure journal, and only one specimen in a jar somewhere, and yet no one would dream of deleting the article for non-notability (in fact we have a number of such articles already), while an article about the largest high school in Cleveland would probably cause a furious VfD debate. Is the obscure species, which is of interest to maybe a few dozen specialists, really more notable than the high school and its thousands of students?
Another interesting exercise is to look at the 1911 encyclopedia articles. Hundreds of obscure personages of ancient Rome each have their own article, carefully documented and cited, but there is no article for Standard Oil; it is briefly described in Rockefeller's bio, and under Trusts, but there is no encyclopedic description of the company itself, and ditto for the many other companies of the time. Despite the evidence all around them that corporations had come to be a significant part of their world, it seems that the 1911EBers had the idea that corporations were somehow "unencyclopedic", and to us today it looks like an odd oversight in Britannica's coverage.
So yes, there is a place for elision and summarization; but let's not make the mistakes of our predecessors. Everything can be fixed later, if need be.
Stan
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