http://twitter.com/alisonclement/status/8421314259
"Yesterday I asked one of my students if she knew what an encyclopedia is, and she said, Is it something like Wikipedia?"
- d.
That's probably an unusually accurate answer ;-) It's quite a hard question.
A lot of people have a fairly intuitive feel for it, but they cannot tell you why.
I actually looked around in the literature to try to find a workable definition for what an encyclopedia is, and the best answer I found that, for a significant number (although certainly not the majority) of articles, the Wikipedia goes outside it.
On 30/01/2010, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://twitter.com/alisonclement/status/8421314259
"Yesterday I asked one of my students if she knew what an encyclopedia is, and she said, Is it something like Wikipedia?"
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 30 January 2010 20:14, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
That's probably an unusually accurate answer ;-) It's quite a hard question. A lot of people have a fairly intuitive feel for it, but they cannot tell you why. I actually looked around in the literature to try to find a workable definition for what an encyclopedia is, and the best answer I found that, for a significant number (although certainly not the majority) of articles, the Wikipedia goes outside it.
Wikipedia is what an encyclopedia *will be*.
I'm seeing specialist encyclopedias increasingly go to wikis these days. There's still a place for the "one smart person writes about everything" model in specialist encyclopedias, and some place for "a bunch of smart people write about everything."
For general encyclopedias, Wikipedia has made both models economically obsolete. (Many lament this.) I can see wikis doing the same for specialist encyclopedias.
- d.