[WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR

[Ray Saintonge]

charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

>"Thomas Dalton" wrote 
>  
>
>>We don't need to go through and put "So-and-so says"
>>at the beginning of every sentence in the encyclopaedia.
>>    
>>
>I basically agree. The referencing junkies will push us back a notch, to where we have the 'materials for an encylopedia', not the encyclopedia itself. Or perhaps that has always been where we are. In which case we are delaying the day when we have 'finished' articles. 
>
I don't believe that we will ever have "finished" articles.  Referencing 
still needs to be balanced with readability.  Some sentence adverbs are 
there to maintain the flow of text, but there is an art to not 
introducing bias through their use.

>Is this good or bad? Well, the Internet is full of argumentative people, and many topics are contentious. The way to deal with those people and topics may well be to summarise controversies. But we really do need, even there, a degree of concision; otherwise we are going merely to recreate the scholasticism of past centuries. 
>
Verbatim!  All of it! ;-)

>And then, in fact, people want to look up facts in encyclopedias. They don't always want quibbles.
>
Exactly.  They do not want to become a part of the controversy.  Most 
are not even interested in critical evaluations.  Many will be satisfied 
with urban legends and conspiracy theories that relieve them from the 
responsibility of thinking.

>As with many things here, we'll sort this out; but not very quickly.
>
At one time "factoring" talk pages was considered a virtue.  The few 
times that I tried it showed me that the task was nearly impossible when 
en:wp had fewer than 50,000 articles.  The impossibility has scaled very 
well.

Ec