[Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery

[Nikola Smolenski]

Michael Peel wrote:
> On 15 May 2009, at 08:01, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> 
>> Perhaps this is off-topic, but I wanted to say it for a long time. The
>> more time passes, the more I wonder if people who work on Wikipedia  
>> have
>> ever seen an encyclopedia. On Wikipedia, dictionary definitions and
>> image galleries are forbidden, and stubs are frowned upon. Yet every
>> encyclopedia I have ever seen has dictionary definitions, and image
>> galleries, and stubs-a-plenty.
>>
>> I guess that conclusion is that we are doing something wrong.
> 
> They're not forbidden: they're just in a different location  
> (Wiktionary and Commons).

Wiktionary has dictionary definitions, but they can't be expanded to 
cover what encyclopedic aspects of the topic could be covered.

Commons has image galleries, but it does not have encyclopedic image 
galleries. Commons galleries feature images based on their aesthetic 
value, but do not offer encyclopedic information about the topic that 
should be presented by the images.

> Could you clarify what you mean by "stubs are frowned upon"? The only  
> reason I can think of for that is that it would be better if they  
> were developed into better articles rather than left as stubs...

People dislike stubs. Sometimes, stubs get deleted because they have too 
little information, even while they are about a valid topic. Sometimes, 
stubs get merged into larger articles with suspicious choice of topic. 
Sometimes, stubs get converted into redirects to articles on similar 
topics, where information contained in the stubs is eventually lost. All 
of this is done in cases where a traditional encyclopedia would have stubs.