From: Imran Ghory imran@bits.bris.ac.uk
The central basis on which I argue on vfd when these things come up is that wikipedia should be descriptive not prescriptive. Instructive works come under the remit of wikibooks so that is where they should go.
So a description of how a food is made is encyclopedic, but instructions on how to make that food are not encyclopedic.
Yes, that's a nice clear bright-line _distinction_, but the problem is that apparently there is NOT a consensus or a policy that "wikipedia should be descriptive not prescriptive."
Quoting from the American Heritage Dictionary, the word "encyclopedia" is derived from '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.'
Encyclopedia = "everything-teacher" or "general course of instruction" or "universal textbook of everything." That doesn't exclude prescriptive articles in my opinion.
Well, OK, I didn't really want to argue the point here, so this will be my last word on this. I just wanted to know if there was some history, consensus, policy on this that, as a newcomer, I didn't know about.
dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
From: Imran Ghory imran@bits.bris.ac.uk
The central basis on which I argue on vfd when these things come up is that wikipedia should be descriptive not prescriptive. Instructive works come under the remit of wikibooks so that is where they should go.
So a description of how a food is made is encyclopedic, but instructions on how to make that food are not encyclopedic.
Yes, that's a nice clear bright-line _distinction_, but the problem is that apparently there is NOT a consensus or a policy that "wikipedia should be descriptive not prescriptive."
Such niceties are not a consideration in the attempts of the VfD crowd to maintain the intellectual purity of the Wikipedia.
Quoting from the American Heritage Dictionary, the word "encyclopedia" is derived from '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.'
Encyclopedia = "everything-teacher" or "general course of instruction" or "universal textbook of everything." That doesn't exclude prescriptive articles in my opinion.
The word "textbook" is significant. That's too often their excuse for shuffling good encyclopedic material to Wikibooks.
Well, OK, I didn't really want to argue the point here, so this will be my last word on this. I just wanted to know if there was some history, consensus, policy on this that, as a newcomer, I didn't know about.
There is some old history from at least 2 years ago favoring a broad interpretation to include practical subjects, but I would have a hard time finding it.
Ec