Timwi wrote:
Oh, OK. It's an encyclopedia -- so let's take a look at Wiktionary to find out what an encyclopedia is:
A reference work (often in several volumes) containing in-depth articles on various topics (often arranged in alphabetical order) dealing with a wide range of subjects or with some particular specialty.This doesn't seem to exclude any human knowledge, neither explicitly nor implicitly. What parts of human knowledge should in your view not be covered in an encyclopedia, and why?
There's an implicit assumption (myself included) that the encyclopedia is a condensation or summary of knowledge. However, I think this is a pragmatic position that's developed as a response to the massive increases in human knowledge - print encyclopedias were never going to be a million volumes in length to document the contents of libraries that had grown to multiple millions of volumes. Even online, 20 million 300-page nonfiction books would turn into some 400 million 30K articles if there's no summarization - a rather daunting prospect!
Still, it's an interesting thought experiment to take a random nonfiction book from your shelf and ask "what if I just wikified the entire contents verbatim".
Stan