[WikiEN-l] Foundational rumblings

[Carcharoth]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 5:15 PM, stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

<snip>

>> But neutrality means, surely, that treatments
>> that are really "introduction to X from the POV of Y" are out of place,
>> or at least to be seriously deprecated.
>
> WWIN might be the actual place to say that 'Wikipedia is not a place
> for introductory-level articles.'

I don't think Charles was saying we shouldn't have introductory-level
articles. I think he was saying that if we do have introductory-level
articles, they need to not be skewed to a POV.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_articles_accessible#.22Introduction_to....22_articles

> It's a valid argument, even if it confronts our natural desire to
> explain things, but is it another paradox?  Does our encyclopedic
> constraint put a severe limitation on the educational potential of our
> articles? Does the "sum of all *information*" limitation represent an
> obstacle to explanationism?

Explantionism?

I really hope that word doesn't catch on... :-)

Carcharoth