[WikiEN-l] Lists of words

[Brian Chau]

After reading your email posted up to this mailing list, I have browsed the
webpages provided in your email. I am suspicious about your accuracy on the
comment concerning about encyclopedia having prescriptive articles.

 

I am writing to give you one very important point: the articles which
contain definitions of words are from Wiktionary (URL: www.wiktionary.org
<http://www.wiktionary.org/> ), which is a branch project of the Wikimedia.
Wikipedia is only providing a link to the webpage in Wiktionary. Therefore
Wikipedia does not contain prescriptive articles as you accused. Although
there are articles linked from the webpages containing lists in the
Wikipedia itself, they are not giving definitions of the phrases. Even if it
provides definitions of phrases, they are mostly in foreign languages other
than English, thus it is difficult to find them from myriad of dictionaries.
I cannot find a point to urge the community to delete the webpages.

 

Encyclopedia is a great collection of knowledge. Even if some content is not
useful to particular person(s), there is no need to delete them unless they
are not decent. There is not any sound reason to object knowledge
accumulation.

 

Last but not least, please *read carefully before you make an accusation*.
It is absolutely unwise to shout out complaints without sufficient proof to
support them. You better look before you leap. Otherwise, you will be the
one who is embarrassed if your naive, childish, and incomprehensive
accusations finally light up the anger of the public.

 

Good luck to you if you are going to continue with such kind of behaviour.

 

Brian Chau

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Guettarda [mailto:guettarda at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, July 31, 2006 6:11 AM
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Lists of words

 

It would appear that lists of words violate the provision that Wikipedia

should not have articles which define individual words, nor should it

include Lists of such definitions. However, we have

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_words ,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_slang and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_phrases , among others.

Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive. Is this policy still being applied

(in which case, *all* of these articles must be deleted), or not (in which

case the wording of the policy needs to be changed). I have raised the issue

at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Lists_of_W
ords

 

I don't know if all of these articles need to be deleted, or whether policy

needs to be modified to reflect reality.  But I think this needs to be

determined in general, not determined piecemeal

 

Ian