[WikiEN-l] Re: Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re
dpbsmith at verizon.net
dpbsmith at verizon.net
Tue May 11 20:42:08 UTC 2004
>From: Imran Ghory <imran at bits.bris.ac.uk>
>The central basis on which I argue on vfd when these things come up is
>that wikipedia should be descriptive not prescriptive. Instructive works
>come under the remit of wikibooks so that is where they should go.
>So a description of how a food is made is encyclopedic, but instructions
>on how to make that food are not encyclopedic.
Yes, that's a nice clear bright-line _distinction_, but the problem is that
apparently there is NOT a consensus or a policy that "wikipedia should be
descriptive not prescriptive."
Quoting from the American Heritage Dictionary, the word "encyclopedia" is
derived from 'enkuklios paideia, made up of enkuklios, "cyclical, periodic,
ordinary," and paideia, "education," and meaning "general education."
Copyists of Latin manuscripts took this phrase to be a single Greek word,
enkuklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the
New Latin word encyclopaedia, coming into English with the sense "general
course of instruction," first recorded in 1531.'
Encyclopedia = "everything-teacher" or "general course of instruction" or
"universal textbook of everything." That doesn't exclude prescriptive
articles in my opinion.
Well, OK, I didn't really want to argue the point here, so this will be my
last word on this. I just wanted to know if there was some history,
consensus, policy on this that, as a newcomer, I didn't know about.
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