Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 5/28/05, Timwi timwi@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