Merritt L. Perkins wrote:
>
> What is an encyclopedia?
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's former project leader, spend some time
pondering this question. Specifically, he wrote "The elements of an
encyclopedia project", which you can find at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_elements_of_an_encyclopedia_pr
oject . There are other essays at http://meta.wikipedia.org/ that
you might enjoy as well. Feel free to post your own thought on the
subject!
Stephen G.
Conversation from Talk pages:
ANGELA:I've just seen your post to the intlwiki
mailing list. I can't reply there as I'm not currently
subscribing to it and I've forgotten my password to
re-subscribe, so I'll reply here instead. Feel free to
copy this to the list if you want to.
I disagree with creating articles which consist only
of interlanguage links and I tend to delete such pages
from the English Wikipedia. It wastes someone's time
if they follow a link thinking they will get some
useful information, only to find a blank page. It may
be useful for those who want to write articles in
other languages, but frustrating and confusing for
those trying to read Wikipedia. Linking should occur
after the article is written, not before. Angela
21:59, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)
STEVERTIGO:Paraphrasing what you said,(apologies :) in
a different context: {I disagree with creating stub
articles which consist only of a couple paragraphs and
I tend to delete such pages from the English
Wikipedia. It wastes someone's time if they follow a
link thinking they will get some useful information,
only to find a unprofessional and incomplete article.
It may be useful for those who want to add or
contribute to these articles, but frustrating and
confusing for those trying to read Wikipedia.
Professional quality should be attained before not
after the article is written.} ??sv 22:20, Aug 16,
2003 (UTC)
P.S -- I wrote back to Tarq on
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/intlwiki-l/2003-August/001999.html
ANGELA:But a stub can contain useful information. IL
links do not. They only tell you that there may or may
not be some info in some other language somewhere. A
blank page is confusing. A page with only a little bit
of info is not. Angela
STEVERTIGO:Bu shi ! A stub can also contain useless
information -- the point is not to generalize what
stubs are and what they are good for. Some stubs are
better than others. -- "IL links do not"-- Bu shi ! If
you look at an page with just a title and an IL
link--and you cant read that language--just hover over
the ILlink! Bingo. You can do it right now on the
ar:wikipedia. Thats one situation (as unusual as it
is) where what you said is not true. There are many
more. Where in the rules does it say you cant put x in
front of X? In fact in some ways its better that
making a whole system and then trying to link them up
in some way -- each should give the other ideas about
how to structure stuff organization. Do you mind if I
load this talk up to the mail? -S- P.s -- mail Walter
to reset your password intlwiki-l-owner AT Wikipedia
DOT org
ANGELA: Hovering over links is only useful if you are
in the encyclopedia of a language you don't read. Why
you be there in the first place? If you are in en:
then a link which tells you the page title in Arabic
won't help. I agree with linking the WPs together, but
linking up a load of blank pages is not useful. The
red links are there to tell you a page does not exist.
If you put a link in, it makes it look like the page
does exist. re: load this talk up to the mail... I
don't mind. re: mail Walter. I already clicked the
"send me a new password button" but it hasn't done
anything. I shall do as you suggest.
STEVERTIGO:IL links/usefulness - I respectfully
disagree. TBC-
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
The history of the page
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics
shows two edits by user Chinju at 16:47, 6 Aug 2003. The next edit was
today (17 Aug).
The revision resulting from the second Chinju edit, as currently
displayed in the history, contains garbage. I believe I looked at the
page between the 6th and 17th of August, and it did not contain garbage.
I expect someone else would have noticed in 11 days, too.
I'm worried that this might be database corruption.
-M-
sometime in the near future?
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2003 01:54:14 -0700
User-Agent: KMail/1.5
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Message-Id: <200308170154.14868.maveric149(a)yahoo.com>
Status: RO
X-Status: Q
X-KMail-EncryptionState:
X-KMail-SignatureState:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>I still believe contents is more important;
>all these links, esp. these navigation links
>are superfluous. A good search engine is
>all you need -- frankly, navigations links are
>a waste of resources (time and bandwidth).
>I admit, it nice to click around but going this
>way you usually will not find the info you are
>looking for.
Ah - a true believer in search engines. As with all true believers, there
isn't any point arguing with you.
--mav
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>This is of dubious value. Why don't you trust in
>the reader use wikipedia's search feature?
Uh? The same argument can be made about links in Wikipedia articles to other
Wikipedia articles. Easily accessible links is the whole point of HTML and
the web. Use the Wikipedia search feature indeed.
-- mav
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>As long as resource problems at wikipedia.org
>are not resolved I'd rather vote not to add new
>projects.
Uh? Wikibooks already exists /and/ part of that project's goal is to annotate
and otherwise add value to public domain source texts. No new project needed.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Cross posted to Textbook-L
Brion wrote:
>The thing that would make a Project Sourceberg
>worthwhile is wiki-style annotation of the texts.
Yes! Just so everybody knows, we've been talking about annotation for the
Wikibooks project on Textbook-L. See "disappearing/reappearing column-side
notes," "public domain works with marginal notes" and "Re:
disappearing/reappearing column side-notes" at
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2003-August/subject.html#sta…
Here is a hack of what that may look like:
http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/5/56/Sidenote-column.html
The current idea is to have <note> annotation </note> act as the actual
syntax.
>Annotations could include cross-links to Wikipedia
>and Wiktionary as well as within the document, and
Yep. What would really be neat is an optional java-script feature whereby
double clicking on any word in the text will bring-up the corresponding
Wiktionary entry. But that has to wait for Wiktionary to define many tens of
thousands more words first. I was also thinking of wikifying terms within the
public domain source text on Wikibooks to point to their corresponding
Wikipedia articles. Aside: A different color for cross-Wikimedia links would
be nice so that true external links (outside of Wikimedia) are
distinguishable from cross-Wikimedia links (I've suggested green before).
>we could have a relatively sane system for linking
>from Wikipedia and Wiktionary to *particular spots*
>in the texts, for instance to provide context for a quote.
We could use anchors for this now that Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikibooks all
have the latest and greatest MediaWiki installed.
>Now, that would require some special coding if we want
>to make it a clean system (ie, one where visitors can edit
>annotations but not original text); or one could just dump
>Gutenberg's ASCII texts straight into giant wiki pages and
>do it all by hand.
I'm not convinced that locking the public domain source text would be the best
option since there is a lot of formatting and Wikifying that can be done with
source text. However, I wouldn't mind blocking anons from editing source text
if that can be coded easily enough (since logged-in users are more likely to
know better about not changing the wording of the source text). But at the
very least, annotations should be open to edit by all.
Oh, and other Wikibooks modules should also have the ability to use the
annotation feature (such as textbooks). So that is something to keep in mind
if/when the annotation system is being worked on.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>What is wrong with Project Gutenberg? No need to
>duplicate all and everything ;)
Sorry, but some people don't care to read plain text with page after page of
copyright and disclaimer info in front of it.
Wikibooks plans to host many public domain texts; basically anything in the
public domain you would expect to buy in a college bookstore or find in a
university library. But our focus is on adding value to those texts by
wikifying terms to point to Wikipedia articles and also adding annotation in
the "margin" (a feature that is being worked on for Wikibooks).
--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Okay, Wiktionary should now be back in line with the version of the
software running on the other wikis.
And, hopefully, not too broken. :)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)