On 6/3/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/3/06, Joe Anderson computerjoe.mailinglist@googlemail.com wrote:
It's probably more of a naming thing than anything else, but it does imply a point of view on whether the encyclopaedia has actually been created yet. Is the online version of Wikipedia an encyclopaedia, or is it a peek into a work in progress?
The principle of the Wikipedia is that it's a work in progress, surely?
A perpetual work in progress? Do we never want to deliver a "complete" first version?
Steve
In my mind it should always be possible to take everything from the article namespace (substituting in all the images and templates), throw away everything from all the other namespaces, and be left with what could legitimately be called "an encyclopedia". I think that's a good compromise between immediatism and eventualism, though I suppose it leans fairly heavily toward immediatism (I favor immediately removing unsourced assertions from the article namespace).
Everything else (i.e., everything in all the other namespaces) *should* be reasonably related to the goal of improving "the encyclopedia" as I just defined, but I tend to take a view that this rule need not be very strictly enforced. I think it's especially important when removing content that might be useful to some other project to first give others a chance to export/import it.
Anthony