From: John Lee <johnleemk(a)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(a)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/