Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
I suspect our efforts are more likely to head in this direction at least for now, as the efforts to produce WikiReaders already show. I don't know if this path will lead us to the encyclopedia model of the past, or if we should encourage people to reconceive of the full encyclopedia as a collection of individual specialist encyclopedias.
That is in fact what Wikipedia already is. But the larger context is that those component encyclopedias must also fit in the general encyclopedia framework. Thus we have many different readerships to serve all at once. Use of summary style helps us accomplish this by allowing people to zoom to the level of detail they need while not forcing too much detail on those who need a more condensed version.
An interesting question that raises: Are there in principle *any* limits on the level of detail we want in Wikipedia? Should we try in some vague sense to maintain articles as broad overviews in the style of the traditional encyclopedia, or is arbitrary detail okay as long as it's neutral, verifiable, not original research, and somehow organized so it's optional for those who want the broader overview? For example, there have been dozens of lengthy bibliographies published on [[George Washington]]'s life, and there's a wealth of other material out there, including scholarly debate on relatively minor points of his life; in principle, our treatment of him could include all this, expanding to the point where it consists of maybe 300-400 pages of text. Good idea? Bad idea?
-Mark