Michael Peel wrote:
On 15 May 2009, at 08:01, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
Perhaps this is off-topic, but I wanted to say it
for a long time. The
more time passes, the more I wonder if people who work on Wikipedia
have
ever seen an encyclopedia. On Wikipedia, dictionary definitions and
image galleries are forbidden, and stubs are frowned upon. Yet every
encyclopedia I have ever seen has dictionary definitions, and image
galleries, and stubs-a-plenty.
I guess that conclusion is that we are doing something wrong.
They're not forbidden: they're just in a different location
(Wiktionary and Commons).
Wiktionary has dictionary definitions, but they can't be expanded to
cover what encyclopedic aspects of the topic could be covered.
Commons has image galleries, but it does not have encyclopedic image
galleries. Commons galleries feature images based on their aesthetic
value, but do not offer encyclopedic information about the topic that
should be presented by the images.
Could you clarify what you mean by "stubs are
frowned upon"? The only
reason I can think of for that is that it would be better if they
were developed into better articles rather than left as stubs...
People dislike stubs. Sometimes, stubs get deleted because they have too
little information, even while they are about a valid topic. Sometimes,
stubs get merged into larger articles with suspicious choice of topic.
Sometimes, stubs get converted into redirects to articles on similar
topics, where information contained in the stubs is eventually lost. All
of this is done in cases where a traditional encyclopedia would have stubs.