[WikiEN-l] The Statistical Decline of the English Wikipedia Community

[Bryan Derksen]

Ian Woollard wrote:
> Don't encyclopaedias emphasise generality by their very nature and isn't
> generality a summary? And isn't a summary inherently relatively short?

Only encyclopedias that are explicitly trying to be general
encyclopedias, and that have a physical limit to how many pages they can
pack in.

Specialist encyclopedias can be extremely detailed. You could have an
"Encyclopedia of North American Wildflowers", for example, and it'd have
really specific and detailed articles.

Encyclopedias that don't have a physical limit to how many pages they
can pack in could well take the same level of detail that specialist
encyclopedias have and apply it to everything. There's no compelling
reason I can think of not to. Since there haven't been a whole lot of
those until now, though, there aren't any examples one can point to and
so people don't often think of the possibility.

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