[WikiEN-l] Re: Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re
Ray Saintonge
saintonge at telus.net
Tue May 11 21:59:24 UTC 2004
dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:
>>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."
>
Such niceties are not a consideration in the attempts of the VfD crowd
to maintain the intellectual purity of the Wikipedia.
>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.
>
The word "textbook" is significant. That's too often their excuse for
shuffling good encyclopedic material to Wikibooks.
>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.
>
There is some old history from at least 2 years ago favoring a broad
interpretation to include practical subjects, but I would have a hard
time finding it.
Ec
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