[WikiEN-l] HOWTOs/Recipes/Instructions and other imperative content

[Geoff Burling]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, David Friedland wrote:

>
> The following seems to be the general idea that people have about how-to
> type content on Wikipedia. i.e. that it belongs on wikibooks, not
> wikipedia. I couldn't find anywhere where this was written out as
> policy, so this is my proposed addition to [[What Wikipedia is not]]:
>
>   Under what Wikipedia articles are not:
> * Instructions. Wikipedia seeks to be informative, not instructional.
> Therefore, things like how-tos, recipes, and other types of information
> that provide instruction on something are not appropriate on Wikipedia.
> They are appropriate, however, on Wikibooks, and articles that contain
> only instructional material should be moved to the appropriate area on
> Wikibooks. It is possible that information about instructions are
> appropriate on Wikipedia, but it should be presented in the indicative
> mood, and not the imperative mood that so distinctively marks
> instructional material.
>
I'm throwing out an argument against the concept that an encyclopedia
should be "informative, not instructional", based on one datum: for many
years (perhaps even now, but at least into the 1960's) it was not
uncommon for people to teach themselves how to play chess from the article
in the encyclopedia.

Explanations of other games would also fall under this ban. (Boy, we'd
better check the articles on card & board games -- they might also provide
the instructions on how to play these games.) And providing explanations
of how common gadgets like a faucet or electricity work could also be
instructional: I managed to figure out how to fix a leak in my bathtub
yesterday from studying a diagram.

Yes, we will end up with arguments over NPOV over any set of instructions.
However, we already have NPOV arguments over all kinds of information that
I never suspected existed. (I'm still puzzling over the controversy over
the proper name in English of the river that forms part of the border
between Germany and Poland.) But some of these have been resolved. I don't
see how we can't accomplish the same resolution with instructional material.

Geoff