From: Andre Engels on Friday, December 12, 2003 11:45
AM
On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, The Cunctator wrote:
> I'm not convinced that we should have as a goal that the articles
> reflect the biases of the readership. I would expect both entries on
the
> Statue of Liberty to tell the complete story. I
have trouble seeing
this
as anything
other than a defense of provincialism.
I don't agree. "The full story" is always much too long to tell.
Instead,
we give a summary of it. And that might well be
different for
different
languages. The Dutch page on [[Stabilisation Force
Iraq]] has a
separate
section on the Dutch presence in it, and the opinion
of the Dutch
political parties on that subject. I'd expect the English language
version
to mention that there are Dutch in SFIR, but not that
it takes half of
the
first paragraph, or the discussion in the Dutch
parliament.
Likewise, in the above Statue of Liberty example, I'd expect that the
French version might more about the French reasons to give it, and the
political opinions about it, while the English version
might tell more
about the reaction that the gift got in the U.S.
We cannot tell the whole story, telling the whole
story is cumbersome,
unreadable and laughable. Instead, we have to summarize it.
This is so very, very true....
For stories written on paper.
It is a simple impossibility to tell the whole story in a linear
narrative. But a hyperlinked text is fractal, and has an arbitrary
perimeter of coverage.
Give a good
deal of relevant information, so that at the end people actually get
informed. Information is more important than facts.
"Information is more important than facts"? Information consists of
facts.
And when deciding
at what level we are going to summarize, what would be better than to
watch at what our readership would _want_ to read?
Oh, I don't know, maybe watching at what level tells them the truth.
Look: I make a strong distinction between the tactics and efforts of
individual Wikipedians and what is the intended overall effect. I only
expect individual Wikipedians to work on what they're interested in and
to include the information that they believe is important.
As long as once information (not "facts") is included in Wikipedia, it
isn't removed, then the end result--for Wikipedia, not a particular
entry--is the complete story.
For individual entries, I expect individual Wikipedians to keep entries
as short as possible, and to extract content that forms a
distinguishably distinct (sometimes largely subordinate, sometimes not)
concept to a separate entry. (see [[user:The Cunctator/Agglomeration]]).
As long as that is done, then the end result for each individual entry
is highly readable, concise and authoritative.
Finally, as a reader I would love to know about what the Dutch
parliament's debate on the occupation of Iraq is.