From: Michael Turley <michael.turley(a)gmail.com>
On 9/30/05, JAY JG <jayjg(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
It depends on judgement, which we are supposed to
exercise. There is a
difference between the Wikipedia article on Harry Truman, and David
McCullough's 1120 biography of Truman. Why not include every single
fact
found in McCullough's book? And from Brian
Burnes's and Margaret
Truman's
and Ralph Keyes works, and Harry Truman's own
autobiography as well?
Because it is an encyclopedia article, and 3,000 page encyclopedia
articles,
even if broken up into hundreds of smaller
sub-articles, aren't useful
to
the audience we are trying to serve.
If all of these works are broken up into smaller sub-articles, good
editors will combine them into any number of different, useful and
comprehensive articles that include all the knowledge that all of
these works contain. In other words, every verifiable fact from David
McCullough's book does not have to end up in the Harry Truman article,
but there's no reason every verifiable fact should not be included in
Wikipedia.
Wikipedia
is revolutionary and important because the level of detail
captured is beyond that of any prior work. This is why many here
enjoy Wikipedia more than any other reference. This is also why
Wikipedia is gaining editors every day. The dominant cultural message
is "Your knowledge is useful, please add it. We'll help you sort,
organize, and present it." Filtering the input stream is helpful, as
is merging data to appropriate locations, but to actively work against
adding verifiable NPOV information is a fool's errand that can only
lead to frustration in the long term.
The level of detail we *can* capture, and the level of detail we
*should*
capture, are two entirely different things. This
is still intended to
be a
general purpose encyclopedia for a general
audience. We are writing
articles, not PhD dissertations, or multi-volume histories. Again,
there is
a reason why the History of England article does
not contain the same
amount
of information as Churchill's four volume
"A History of the English
Speaking
Peoples" that has nothing to do with
"Wikipedia is not paper" and
everything
to do with "Wikipedia is an
encyclopedia".
See my reply above for why I believe this is a specious argument. Our
software-based encyclopedia is capable of presenting the general
audience whatever level of detail that they choose to suit their
interest. Just as there is a "History of Malta" link in the "Malta"
article, we're capable of splitting articles as they become too large
for the general "first view". I see no reason why this cannot
continue to scale much further than it has.
states its mission as follows:
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful."
How do you see that as differing from Wikipedia's mission? How do you think
the end products should differ?
Jay.