[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Delirium]

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> How?  Have you ever looked at a paper encyclopaedia?  Every article is
> verifiable from numerous published sources.  We're not paper so we can
> extend to a huge number of articles, and that takes us to the edge of
> what can be referenced from numerous published sources, but if we step
> over that edge we cease to be an encyclopaedia and become something
> else.
>   

I'm not going to argue we should follow their lead, but this isn't 
universally the case.  Britannica, to pick only the most famous 
encyclopedia, is well known for hiring famous people to write original 
research for their articles.  They've toned that down a bit since the 
heydey of their 1911 edition, but it's still very much present.  I would 
say that the idea that an encyclopedia should be a tertiary source based 
strictly on a neutral survey of the existing secondary literature is a 
fairly recent shift, and most encyclopedias don't fully implement it.  
The previous conception of an encyclopedia was that it be a compendium 
of *true* things, even if the truths flatly contradict the existing 
secondary literature (sometimes Britannica will explicitly say things 
like, "most commentators say [x], but this is false").  The 
justification for the truth was not sourcing to existing literature, but 
the combined prestige of the article's author and Britannica itself.

-Mark