--- Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
I suspect our efforts are more likely to head in this direction at least for now, as the efforts to produce WikiReaders already show. I don't know if this path will lead us to the encyclopedia model of the past, or if we should encourage people to reconceive of the full encyclopedia as a collection of individual specialist encyclopedias.
That is in fact what Wikipedia already is. But the larger context is that those component encyclopedias must also fit in the general encyclopedia framework. Thus we have many different readerships to serve all at once. Use of summary style helps us accomplish this by allowing people to zoom to the level of detail they need while not forcing too much detail on those who need a more condensed version.
-- mav
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
I suspect our efforts are more likely to head in this direction at least for now, as the efforts to produce WikiReaders already show. I don't know if this path will lead us to the encyclopedia model of the past, or if we should encourage people to reconceive of the full encyclopedia as a collection of individual specialist encyclopedias.
That is in fact what Wikipedia already is. But the larger context is that those component encyclopedias must also fit in the general encyclopedia framework. Thus we have many different readerships to serve all at once. Use of summary style helps us accomplish this by allowing people to zoom to the level of detail they need while not forcing too much detail on those who need a more condensed version.
An interesting question that raises: Are there in principle *any* limits on the level of detail we want in Wikipedia? Should we try in some vague sense to maintain articles as broad overviews in the style of the traditional encyclopedia, or is arbitrary detail okay as long as it's neutral, verifiable, not original research, and somehow organized so it's optional for those who want the broader overview? For example, there have been dozens of lengthy bibliographies published on [[George Washington]]'s life, and there's a wealth of other material out there, including scholarly debate on relatively minor points of his life; in principle, our treatment of him could include all this, expanding to the point where it consists of maybe 300-400 pages of text. Good idea? Bad idea?
-Mark
On 5/24/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
there have been dozens of lengthy bibliographies published on [[George Washington]]'s life, and there's a wealth of other material out there, including scholarly debate on relatively minor points of his life; in principle, our treatment of him could include all this, expanding to the point where it consists of maybe 300-400 pages of text. Good idea? Bad idea?
I think this would be a bad idea. A core principle of Wikipedia is that it is an encyclopedia, and, despite the lack of size limitations, this principle should still lead us to aim at something which is closer to a traditional encyclopedia than to a text book, biography, or any other other form of resource. It may, however, have a place within Wikibooks.
Angela
Angela wrote:
On 5/24/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
there have been dozens of lengthy bibliographies published on [[George Washington]]'s life, and there's a wealth of other material out there, including scholarly debate on relatively minor points of his life; in principle, our treatment of him could include all this, expanding to the point where it consists of maybe 300-400 pages of text. Good idea? Bad idea?
I think this would be a bad idea. A core principle of Wikipedia is that it is an encyclopedia, and, despite the lack of size limitations, this principle should still lead us to aim at something which is closer to a traditional encyclopedia than to a text book, biography, or any other other form of resource. It may, however, have a place within Wikibooks.
That's my own intuition, but I have trouble figuring out how to actually distinguish between what we do now and that eventuality. I'm not altogether *sure* it's a bad idea either, especially if things can be broken down into useful chunks. For example, [[George Washington at blah]] or [[Controversy over the color of George Washington's slippers]]. I mean, if we collated all our Pokemon-related pages (pardon the obvious example), we probably have a small books' worth of material written on Pokemon already...
-Mark