"Thomas Dalton" wrote
We don't need to go through and put "So-and-so says" at the beginning of every sentence in the encyclopaedia.
I basically agree. The referencing junkies will push us back a notch, to where we have the 'materials for an encylopedia', not the encyclopedia itself. Or perhaps that has always been where we are. In which case we are delaying the day when we have 'finished' articles.
Is this good or bad? Well, the Internet is full of argumentative people, and many topics are contentious. The way to deal with those people and topics may well be to summarise controversies. But we really do need, even there, a degree of concision; otherwise we are going merely to recreate the scholasticism of past centuries. And then, in fact, people want to look up facts in encyclopedias. They don't always want quibbles.
As with many things here, we'll sort this out; but not very quickly.
Charles
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On 12/18/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"Thomas Dalton" wrote
We don't need to go through and put "So-and-so says" at the beginning of every sentence in the encyclopaedia.
I basically agree. The referencing junkies will push us back a notch, to where we have the 'materials for an encylopedia', not the encyclopedia itself. Or perhaps that has always been where we are. In which case we are delaying the day when we have 'finished' articles.
Is this good or bad? Well, the Internet is full of argumentative people, and many topics are contentious. The way to deal with those people and topics may well be to summarise controversies. But we really do need, even there, a degree of concision; otherwise we are going merely to recreate the scholasticism of past centuries. And then, in fact, people want to look up facts in encyclopedias. They don't always want quibbles.
Charles, I disagree. I think people appreciate knowing who said what, and why that person's views are important enough to include. Why should they trust anonymous editors who declare without sources what "the facts" are?
I agree that articles that simply list sources and what they say are tiresome, but that's a question of the writing. Written properly, well-sourced articles are more readable and useful to readers than poorly sourced ones.
Sarah
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"Thomas Dalton" wrote
We don't need to go through and put "So-and-so says" at the beginning of every sentence in the encyclopaedia.
I basically agree. The referencing junkies will push us back a notch, to where we have the 'materials for an encylopedia', not the encyclopedia itself. Or perhaps that has always been where we are. In which case we are delaying the day when we have 'finished' articles.
I don't believe that we will ever have "finished" articles. Referencing still needs to be balanced with readability. Some sentence adverbs are there to maintain the flow of text, but there is an art to not introducing bias through their use.
Is this good or bad? Well, the Internet is full of argumentative people, and many topics are contentious. The way to deal with those people and topics may well be to summarise controversies. But we really do need, even there, a degree of concision; otherwise we are going merely to recreate the scholasticism of past centuries.
Verbatim! All of it! ;-)
And then, in fact, people want to look up facts in encyclopedias. They don't always want quibbles.
Exactly. They do not want to become a part of the controversy. Most are not even interested in critical evaluations. Many will be satisfied with urban legends and conspiracy theories that relieve them from the responsibility of thinking.
As with many things here, we'll sort this out; but not very quickly.
At one time "factoring" talk pages was considered a virtue. The few times that I tried it showed me that the task was nearly impossible when en:wp had fewer than 50,000 articles. The impossibility has scaled very well.
Ec