Speaking of which, why on earth do we mention etymologies of words in
articles such as [[en:Archaeology]] or [[en:Zoölogy]]?
When [[scn:Trisceli]] was the Translation of the Week, I had a laugh
over reading in Chinese "The etymology of the word 'three-legged
figure'' is from the Greek 'triskelion'" or something along those
lines because quite obviously the Chinese translation (a meaning-based
translation meaning iirc "three-legged figure") is not related to the
Greek, but it was amended so as to say that the _English_ name came
from the Greek.
Other Chinese articles including etymologies that are even more
irrelevant than in the English versions are articles on the sciences;
I mostly deleted those sections when /manually/ converting to
Traditional for closed-zh-tw: (at the time, of course, it was zh-tw:).
Mark
On 29/05/05, Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 5/28/05, Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote:
Funny, and somehow I thought that the goal of
Wikipedia is to "collect
the sum of human knowledge".
So how do wikibooks, wiktionary, and wikiquotes fit into this?
I didn't invent any of those. Nor, incidentally, did I invent Wikipedia
or any guidelines on what should or should not go into Wikipedia. Nor
did I invent the "sum of human knowledge" phrasing, which is found in
numerous places on Wikipedia. When I first came here, I interpreted it
to mean that pretty much anything can go into Wikipedia, including those
kinds of things that are now collected on Wiktionary (which didn't exist
at the time). But with the size of the community, my opinion pretty much
doesn't count, and so I have over time acquired a certain indifference
towards it and just go with what most other people think.
But whenever I go back to thinking about it, I keep coming to the
conclusion that this is wrong. The majority of the community is not
always right. Please don't interpret this to mean that I think *I*'m
right. It's just that there is no real way to change the ways of
Wikipedia for as long as it is run by a community which has a certain
majority opinion, even if that opinion is wrong or sub-optimal.
The ways of the community aren't always consistent. I would have thought
that [[Reich]] looks more like a dictionary entry (having pronunciation,
translations, etymology and cognates, etc.), but it clearly survived my
VfD nomination; yet similar articles on other words would probably be
transwikied. On the other hand, my (not-really-an-)article on
[[Piperade]] (containing the sentence "'''Piperade''' is a
[[recipe|dish]]."), was speedy-deleted without VfD process, even though
I would have thought that the single piece of information I entered was
encyclopedic.
I am not a rampant inclusionist; I agree to the concepts of notability
and verifiability. But I guess within the constraints of notability and
verifiability, I am an inclusionist. I feel that, since the information
on Wiktionary is just as verifiable as the information on Wikipedia, and
given the fact that there are numerous dictionaries and etymological
reference works establishing their notability, the distinction between a
"dictionary entry" and an "encyclopaedia entry" seems artificial.
I have not really thought about Wikibooks yet. Whenever I try to, the
first question I ask myself is, "Isn't an encyclopaedia a book?"
Timwi
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