Hoi, Jimbo spoke about his impression that people want to know the qualifications of authors. This has been discussed to deatch so I will not comment. :)
Listening to the show I heard something else, it was put forward that people take wikipedia as the "gospel truth" either because they do not have more time or because they still do not have the skills to do some proper research. Jimbo dit put it very well on the show that the intention of an encyclopedia is to cover the basics of a subject. Having thought about it for a day, I came up with this conclusion: we emphasise on providing the sources for the articles written. This is cool for as far as it goes. However the emphasis should be on where the reader should go next. It is much more productive to state what and where good further reading can be found. The point is that the source for a fact does not necessarily make good reading even though it proves a factoid. It is much more productive to show where to go next.
The crux is that the mentioning of sources make a Wikipedia article credible. It does not point where to go for further research or information. To me this is distinctly different and it is much more important that we encourage people to learn more.
Thanks, GerardM
This involves both further reading, popular books and scholarly articles, and links to the best websites. These parts of an article are just as important as the basic summary of knowledge in the article itself. So to a certain extent we do want to be a web directory. Perhaps [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]] ought to be revised a bit to reflect this goal.
Fred
On May 25, 2005, at 12:51 AM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, Jimbo spoke about his impression that people want to know the qualifications of authors. This has been discussed to deatch so I will not comment. :)
Listening to the show I heard something else, it was put forward that people take wikipedia as the "gospel truth" either because they do not have more time or because they still do not have the skills to do some proper research. Jimbo dit put it very well on the show that the intention of an encyclopedia is to cover the basics of a subject. Having thought about it for a day, I came up with this conclusion: we emphasise on providing the sources for the articles written. This is cool for as far as it goes. However the emphasis should be on where the reader should go next. It is much more productive to state what and where good further reading can be found. The point is that the source for a fact does not necessarily make good reading even though it proves a factoid. It is much more productive to show where to go next.
The crux is that the mentioning of sources make a Wikipedia article credible. It does not point where to go for further research or information. To me this is distinctly different and it is much more important that we encourage people to learn more.
Thanks, GerardM _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Listening to the show I heard something else, it was put forward that people take wikipedia as the "gospel truth" either because they do not have more time or because they still do not have the skills to do some proper research.
The biggest problem with the "gospel truth" is the number of people who blindly believe the gospel.
I came up with this conclusion: we emphasise on providing the sources for the articles written. This is cool for as far as it goes. However the emphasis should be on where the reader should go next. It is much more productive to state what and where good further reading can be found. The point is that the source for a fact does not necessarily make good reading even though it proves a factoid. It is much more productive to show where to go next.
The crux is that the mentioning of sources make a Wikipedia article credible. It does not point where to go for further research or information. To me this is distinctly different and it is much more important that we encourage people to learn more.
The sources are a place for the reader to go next. In most cases they will contain much more information than what can be provided in an encyclopedia. Even where your distinction may be valid the onus is still upon the reader who wants to know more to track down the cited source. The purpose of references is to make the article verifiable. If the readers don't sometimes do that verification it becomes too easy to just list phoney references.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Listening to the show I heard something else, it was put forward that people take wikipedia as the "gospel truth" either because they do not have more time or because they still do not have the skills to do some proper research.
The biggest problem with the "gospel truth" is the number of people who blindly believe the gospel.
I came up with this conclusion: we emphasise on providing the sources for the articles written. This is cool for as far as it goes. However the emphasis should be on where the reader should go next. It is much more productive to state what and where good further reading can be found. The point is that the source for a fact does not necessarily make good reading even though it proves a factoid. It is much more productive to show where to go next.
The crux is that the mentioning of sources make a Wikipedia article credible. It does not point where to go for further research or information. To me this is distinctly different and it is much more important that we encourage people to learn more.
The sources are a place for the reader to go next. In most cases they will contain much more information than what can be provided in an encyclopedia. Even where your distinction may be valid the onus is still upon the reader who wants to know more to track down the cited source. The purpose of references is to make the article verifiable. If the readers don't sometimes do that verification it becomes too easy to just list phoney references.
Hoi, The sources are a place where information can be verified. They are not necessarily easily available, they are not necessararily the best place to find more and better information. Sources refer to what was used to write an article or to prove a point. What I am on about is that given a factual article where do you turn to for more informative information that is readily available and goes beyond what can be expected of an encyclopedia. The point made in the program was that there is more than one source, people have to learn that one source however correct is not all there is to know about a subject. We try our best to be NPOV and it is good to know where to find the POV's. My point is that giving references for verification is defensive while pointing out where more can be found is one way of extending a helping hand to the people in our public who are looking for more information.
Thanks, GerardM
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Jimbo dit put it very well on the show that the intention of an encyclopedia is to cover the basics of a subject. [...] To me it is much more important that we encourage people to learn more.
I disagree (to both). Traditional encyclopaedias may have covered only the "basics" of the subject because they have constraints inherent in print publication. Wikipedia is not paper, and we can cover any subject in any depth we want -- all we need is the volunteers to write it.
I believe that if there is to learn more, then it belongs in Wikipedia too.
Timwi
On 5/28/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
I disagree (to both). Traditional encyclopaedias may have covered only the "basics" of the subject because they have constraints inherent in print publication. Wikipedia is not paper, and we can cover any subject in any depth we want -- all we need is the volunteers to write it.
I believe that if there is to learn more, then it belongs in Wikipedia too.
Hogwash. When you go into a library it's highly likely that you could go directly to a detailed book on whatever subject you are interested in, but libraries still have encyclopedias.
Readers have finite time, and very many have a literacy level much lower than the typical Wikipedia editor. By making our articles too detailed we run the risk of making the basic information inaccessible to the vast majority of the users who are only interested in the basics.
Furthermore, while Wikipedia is not paper there are many other resources limitations that we face, for example: editors. How can we ensure the accuracy, quality, and NPOVness of a great many very long and detailed articles? Also we are source limited, as an article on a subject becomes increasingly long it becomes increasingly difficult to add to it without engaging in original research. So do have scaling limits of our own.
There is a place in the world for large amounts of detailed material, but this shouldn't be the goal of an encyclopedia. The methods used to create, edit, and maintain very highly detailed works differ from the best methods for a higher level work and the community of editors most likely differs as well.
There is great value in being concise and today we mostly look to an encyclopedia for a concise source.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 5/28/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
I disagree (to both). Traditional encyclopaedias may have covered only the "basics" of the subject because they have constraints inherent in print publication. Wikipedia is not paper, and we can cover any subject in any depth we want -- all we need is the volunteers to write it.
I believe that if there is to learn more, then it belongs in Wikipedia too.
Hogwash. When you go into a library it's highly likely that you could go directly to a detailed book on whatever subject you are interested in, but libraries still have encyclopedias.
If you're going to the library anyway, then yes, you might as well go for a specialised book rather than a paper(!) encyclopaedia.
By making our articles too detailed
I said "I think the detail belongs in Wikipedia", not "I think the detail belongs in a Wikipedia article on a more general topic". If I want to write about the Time Hierarchy Theorem, then I will write about it at [[Time Hierarchy Theorem]] and not at [[Computer Science]]. Incidentally, noone has yet suggested to delete [[Time Hierarchy Theorem]], or indeed any other article, for making Wikipedia "too detailed".
we run the risk of making the basic information inaccessible to the vast majority of the users who are only interested in the basics.
People who are only interested in the basics can still look up only the basics. It's a question of organisation, not a question of inclusion.
Furthermore, while Wikipedia is not paper there are many other resources limitations that we face, for example: editors. How can we ensure the accuracy, quality, and NPOVness
We are already facing the problem of ensuring accuracy, quality and NPOVness. Deleting content that makes Wikipedia "too detailed" is not going to help that problem.
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".
Timwi
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?
:)
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
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@gmx.net wrote:
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
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Timwi (timwi@gmx.net) [050529 07:23]:
Incidentally, noone has yet suggested to delete [[Time Hierarchy Theorem]], or indeed any other article, for making Wikipedia "too detailed".
The more ardent deleters have indeed put articles up for deletion for being "too detailed".
we run the risk of making the basic information inaccessible to the vast majority of the users who are only interested in the basics.
People who are only interested in the basics can still look up only the basics. It's a question of organisation, not a question of inclusion.
Yep. There's nothing wrong with subarticles of subarticles.
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".
Haven't you heard? Our new slogan is "Wikipedia is full. Go away." Now only *deserving* articles are kept (whatever that means); all others apparently have to make their case or be deleted in a consensus vote of three versus one.
- d.
On 5/28/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
The more ardent deleters have indeed put articles up for deletion for being "too detailed".
Hm. I haven't seen that one yet, ... That's grounds for pruning text or splitting an article and not grounds for deletion.
I suppose there might be a case where there is so much inappropriate material that it would be better to restart.... but that would be a very special case.
I'd really like to see an example so I could lart the culprit myself.
People who are only interested in the basics can still look up only the basics. It's a question of organisation, not a question of inclusion.
Yep. There's nothing wrong with subarticles of subarticles.
Eh, there are some subarticles that are out of date because people find the main one and edit it while the sub article doesn't get any love and attention. Also, when you start splitting articles you end up with a lot of duplicated material that can make reading all of them (when you are really interested) tedious. For example, consider articles about characters in works of fiction vs the text on the characters all gathered up under the work in question, or an article 'Characters used in soandsos writings' + redirects.
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".
Haven't you heard? Our new slogan is "Wikipedia is full. Go away." Now only *deserving* articles are kept (whatever that means); all others apparently have to make their case or be deleted in a consensus vote of three versus one.
Wikipedia isn't the only place in the world to store knowledge. It's clear that we already are aware of that, which is why we have wikibooks, wikiquotes, and wiktionary.
If I gave you an algorithm that generated an infinite amount of text without ever repeating itself I could rightly tell you that the answer to any question you might ask is in the output. But you find this very useful.
There is value in being concise, there is value to partitioning, and there is value to excluding.
*Wikipedia is not paper*. I see this often cited, but I think it is often cited by people who fail to grasp all of the implications, for example: We have a search engine, redirects, and hyperlinks, so every subject doesn't need an article of its own; people can be expected to find material inside other articles. We can provide instanious links to detailed information in millions of places all over the Internet as well as information contained in other wikimedia projects, so it is not optimum to provide all possible details in every article.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. This implies a relationship between the reader and the material (he is searching a lot and looking for more basic information on average), and it implies things about the creation of material (citations, avoiding original research, NPOV, trying to include a more general audience). Some content is best created and presented under a different set of criteria. By excluding this content, and perhaps giving it a home of its own, we improve useablity for everyone.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
The more ardent deleters have indeed put articles up for deletion for being "too detailed".
Hm. I haven't seen that one yet, ... That's grounds for pruning text or splitting an article and not grounds for deletion.
My point exactly. Detail does belong in Wikipedia.
Eh, there are some subarticles that are out of date because people find the main one and edit it while the sub article doesn't get any love and attention.
Then I guess that means the organisation has failed. In fact, I can think of an example. At some point (I was new to Wikipedia at the time) I decided to write something about UTF-8, because this is something I find interesting and something I think I know about. However, for reasons I don't know, I went to [[Unicode]] rather than [[UTF-8]]. The article had a section on UTF-8, but that section was not very detailed, so I decided to add all the detail I know about UTF-8 to that article, not knowing that the same detail already existed on [[UTF-8]]. If the section had had a link in the form of "for more detail, see [[UTF-8]]", this would not have happened. So, the problem is not that there is too much detail about UTF-8, but rather that the detail is not organised in such a way that people will find it.
Also, when you start splitting articles you end up with a lot of duplicated material that can make reading all of them (when you are really interested) tedious.
Again, this is a question of organisation. I would contend that it is always possible, albeit sometimes extremely hard, to organise the material in such a way that very little material (if not even no material at all) is duplicated, to the point that reading all of it is no longer tedious.
For example, consider articles about characters in works of fiction vs the text on the characters all gathered up under the work in question, or an article 'Characters used in soandsos writings' + redirects.
I don't think this question should be asked this generally. Some characters are so major that they deserve an article of their own, while others are minor and should be covered in a more general article (such as the one on the work of fiction itself, or something like [[Minor characters from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]).
In fact, this is one example of a very noticeable difference between the English and German Wikipedias. In English, we have an article on [[Vulcan (Star Trek)]], while the German Wikipedia apparently has a policy against such articles and requires the topic to be covered on an article about all Star Trek fictional races. As a result, the German Wikipedia will never acquire the amount of detail that we have on the Vulcans. Of course, the prevailing opinion in the German Wikipedian community is that this level of detail is unwanted, so people don't see a problem with it. I am very glad that the same is not true of the English Wikipedia, allowing volunteers to write about what they find interesting rather than what some admins deem "wanted".
Timwi
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".
Haven't you heard? Our new slogan is "Wikipedia is full. Go away." Now only *deserving* articles are kept (whatever that means); all others apparently have to make their case or be deleted in a consensus vote of three versus one.
Wikipedia isn't the only place in the world to store knowledge. It's clear that we already are aware of that, which is why we have wikibooks, wikiquotes, and wiktionary.
If I gave you an algorithm that generated an infinite amount of text without ever repeating itself I could rightly tell you that the answer to any question you might ask is in the output. But you find this very useful.
There is value in being concise, there is value to partitioning, and there is value to excluding.
*Wikipedia is not paper*. I see this often cited, but I think it is often cited by people who fail to grasp all of the implications, for example: We have a search engine, redirects, and hyperlinks, so every subject doesn't need an article of its own; people can be expected to find material inside other articles. We can provide instanious links to detailed information in millions of places all over the Internet as well as information contained in other wikimedia projects, so it is not optimum to provide all possible details in every article.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. This implies a relationship between the reader and the material (he is searching a lot and looking for more basic information on average), and it implies things about the creation of material (citations, avoiding original research, NPOV, trying to include a more general audience). Some content is best created and presented under a different set of criteria. By excluding this content, and perhaps giving it a home of its own, we improve useablity for everyone.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Wikipedia isn't the only place in the world to store knowledge. It's clear that we already are aware of that, which is why we have wikibooks, wikiquotes, and wiktionary.
No, not really. The reason we have Wikibooks, Wikiquote and Wiktionary is because the community wanted them. Again, it comes down to the community majority opinion. It is no surprise that, with there being a distinction between an "encyclopaedia" and a "dictionary" in the real world, a majority of contributors will want to mirror that distinction out of tradition. The statement that "Wikipedia isn't the only place in the world to store knowledge" is invented later to justify this. It is relatively obvious that it would be hypothetically possible to store all knowledge in Wikipedia; people do not deny this, but they only question that it is desirable. And again, it comes down to the community majority opinion.
Timwi
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
On 5/28/05, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
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.
I'm aware of this, although it's clear that summarization is implied simply because it is necessary. :)
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... :-) )
Right, I don't argue that we don't want to eventually have everything... But rather that it's useful to have a concise resource as well as comprehensive ones, that we should call the concise resource an encyclopedia (since that meshes well with the common use), and that our rules and abilities make us better suited to producing the concise resource first. This doesn't mean I think people should write detailed information, bur rather that they should do whatever they want, but the details stuff probably belongs some place else, such as wikibooks.
Timwi wrote:
Funny, and somehow I thought that the goal of Wikipedia is to "collect the sum of human knowledge".
Timwi
Hoi, To collect the sum of human knowledge is the goal of the Wikimedia Foundation. It is not necessarily the goal of Wikipedia, its goal is to create a free-content encyclopedia. Thanks, GerardM
--- Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Wikipedia is not paper, and we can cover any subject in any depth we want -- all we need is the volunteers to write it.
While I fully agree with that statement, I'd like to add that, from a usability perspective, having all that depth in one article is bad. Thus the use of summary style that allows readers to zoom to the level of detail they need.
-- mav
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