Timwi wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
There is a place in the world for large amounts of detailed material, but this shouldn't be the goal of an encyclopedia.
Funny, and somehow I thought that the goal of Wikipedia is to "collect the sum of human knowledge".
An oft-used definition of encyclopedia is "compendium of human knowledge", where "compendium" means a summarized collection. On the other hand, my OED defines "encyclopedia" as a "literary work containing extensive information on all branches of knowledge", with no reference to abbreviation or summarization.
So we have a situation where reasonable people can differ as to whether summarization is desirable. Empirically, however, I think if one were to take a recent scientific paper and make a WP article embodying every last bit of its content, including charts, tables, statistical methods, experimental technique, etc, most editors would find the result "too detailed". But perhaps when all the summary-type articles are done, this will be the new frontier of development. (anything but endless recategorization, please... :-) )
Stan