Concerning the page :[[Wikipedia:Article deletion log]] and several other willy-nilly uses of the word "article".
Why in the world would we ever want to delete an article? I know we don't delete articles (as in encyclopedia articles) but others may not be aware of this. It is already difficult enough to explain the difference between certain types of wikipedia-specific pages, mere definition pages, vandalized pages and an actual encyclopedia articles without added confusion.
As Larry often said, every page in wikipedia is a page but not every page is an article (or something like that). We needn't add un-needed confusion by loosely using the word "article" for every page. This also effects the proposed new wording of the front page which will read "anyone can edit any article" -- which is a completely true statement if we stick with Larry's definition and the criteria used by the statistics to estimate the number of articles in the database.
Our statistics currently reads (with added emphasis by me):
"There 63416 total /pages/ in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about Wikipedia, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as /articles/. Excluding those, there are 35128 pages that are probably legitimate /articles/."
Why then does the save button always say "save article"?
--mav
On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Why in the world would we ever want to delete an article? I know we don't delete articles (as in encyclopedia articles) but others may not be aware of this. It is already difficult enough to explain the difference between certain types of wikipedia-specific pages, mere definition pages, vandalized pages and an actual encyclopedia articles without added confusion.
Wikipedia is the application of wiki to the goal of building an encyclopedia. The question is which terminology to use:
Wiki term Encyclopedia term
page entry (German: Stichwort) article article redirect reference (?) (German: Hinweis)
The difference is that a non-article "entry" in a printed encyclopedia is a single line (East Germany, see German Democratic Republic) while the word "page" sounds like it contains a lot of text.
Lars Aronsson wrote:
On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, Daniel Mayer wrote:
It is already difficult enough to explain the difference between certain types of wikipedia-specific pages, mere definition pages, vandalized pages and an actual encyclopedia articles without added confusion.
Wikipedia is the application of wiki to the goal of building an encyclopedia. The question is which terminology to use:
Wiki term Encyclopedia term
page entry (German: Stichwort) article article redirect reference (?) (German: Hinweis)
The difference is that a non-article "entry" in a printed encyclopedia is a single line (East Germany, see German Democratic Republic) while the word "page" sounds like it contains a lot of text.
"Page" is standard _web_ terminology for a single 2-dimensional continuous expanse of space that contains text and/or images, of any size.
"Entry" is I think not general enough, because we use the same tools to access and edit both encyclopedic material ("entries") and support materials: commentary about articles, the introduction to the encyclopedia and how to use it, and personal bios of the contributors and editors. I would hesitate to call these "[encyclopedia] entries", but I would not hesitate to call them "[web] pages".
Just my two cents.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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