Quoting David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
On 16/12/2007, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
- Mainly that they're inappropriate to an encyclopedia.
This is an argument I find less than compelling. Are schools not encyclopedic? Is having articles on every two-bit band that meets [[WP:MUSIC]] appropriate to an encyclopedia? We all have our different intuitions about what an encyclopedia should have in it. One thing is clear: Wikipedia is not a traditional encyclopedia.
What you're talking about there is range of coverage - spoiler warnings is a question of style of coverage. So whether a topic is covered at all doesn't address that.
I guess I lied slightly when I said my last message was going to be my last on the topic. The point I was trying to make was the in general notions of what are appropriate to a traditional encyclopedia don't in general sit well with Wikipedia. (A traditional encyclopedia isn't editable by random people and doesn't have a history of every edit and an associated talk page etc.). And given that one thing we certainly do have is more detail about plots and such than a traditional encyclopedia. And as I see it at least, if we are going to have more content than a traditional encyclopedia all the more so we shouldn't be bound by the standard stylistic conventions and in fact we are not. For example, what standard encyclopedia has banner warnings about neutrality or {{fact}} tags. We should care about what will work best and what will help the project the most, not what EB or anyone else would do in this situation. We're beating EB by being Wikipedia. There's no need to handicap ourselves by slavishly imitating our predecessors.