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

[Anthony]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 9:28 PM, MuZemike <muzemike at gmail.com> wrote:
> We must also take into account the popularity factor when it comes to
> comparing WMF wikis. It is obvious of the advantage Wikipedia has over
> all the other wikis in that is immensely more popular and is received
> much more widely than all other wikis.

You think popularity is the cause of Wiktionary sucking?  I think it's
the effect.

David Levy doesn't quote like everyone else, so I've stripped the
attributions from the following:

>> It's quite explicitly banned by [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary]],
>> which doesn't mention anything about cultural/historical significance, isn't
>> it?
>
> The text in question (the wording of which could be improved) is
> intended to refer to the concept of having two articles about the same
> subject (a particular petroleum-derived liquid mixture, in this case).

That wouldn't make sense.  Dictionaries don't have two entries about
the same subject.  They have one entry about the word petrol, and one
entry about the word gasoline.

>> You seem to go back and forth on whether
>> [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary]] is stating that articles
>> should not be formatted as dictionary entries, or whether it imposes
>> notability requirements of its own.
>
> If you interpreted anything that I wrote to mean the latter, you misunderstood.

I asked if it was an inclusion guideline or a formatting guideline,
and you said it was an inclusion guideline.

If you're now saying it is in fact a formatting guideline, then you
can ignore all my posts after you said it was an inclusion guideline.

If you're saying that it's an inclusion guideline, and not a
formatting guideline, because it states that articles which are
formatted as dictionary entries should not be included...then you can
ignore all my posts after you said it was an inclusion guideline.

> Taken as a whole, these articles fall somewhere between the the types
> of content found in conventional dictionaries and encyclopedias.  I
> don't assert that it inherently makes more sense to include them in
> Wikipedia than it does to include them in Wiktionary, and I probably
> would support a proposal to permit the latter and transwiki them en
> masse.

Doesn't transwiking still suck, or have the developers finally
delivered on the features which for so long were put off until "after
single user login is finished"?

>> Basically, if you took a dictionary, and removed the space
>> requirements, and then took an encyclopedia, and removed the space
>> requirements, the content of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger would
>> likely be in the former, and not the latter.
>
> For whatever reason, that isn't how things have turned out.  Perhaps
> we should shift our focus toward exploring the possibility.

That's fine with me.  I'm not actually all that sure whether or not
Wikipedians *should* ignore [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a
dictionary]].  I was just defending my statement that they do.