[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is not a dictionary (was: Re: Old Wikipedia backups discovered)

[Anthony]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 10:23 AM, David Levy <lifeisunfair at gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
>
>> > In this example, the concept *is* the word, with its cultural
>> > history, associations etc.
>
> Anthony replied:
>
>> Can you give an example of that in a traditional encyclopedia?
>
> The English Wikipedia contains individual articles about each of the
> 144 "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" television episodes.  Can you give an
> example of that in a traditional encyclopedia?

That might be a relevant question if we were discussing whether or not
has television episode guide entries.  As it stands we're discussing
whether or not it has dictionary entries.

> As implicitly acknowledged in your question, Wikipedia isn't a
> traditional encyclopedia.

And that's my whole point.  Wikipedia *does* contain lots of
dictionary entires, even though there is a page saying that it
shouldn't.

>> And if the concept is the word, shouldn't the title of the article be
>> [[the word "meh"]]?
>
> Why?

Disambiguation.  I guess [["meh"]] would be acceptable, though.  It's
not so important with interjections, but any word which is a noun
would suffer from the problem.  [[shithead]] should be about
shitheads, not the word shithead, just like [[dog]] is about dogs, not
the word dog.