[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[Ray Saintonge]

Carcharoth wrote:
> Can you remember which French encyclopedias did that elaborate scheme.
> It sounds interesting.
>
> The difference with Wikipedia is the possibilities of linkage and
> transclusions and differing formats available in a digital
> encyclopedia, but the downside is the inconsistency in the solutions
> devised and discarded and reinvented over the years in an encyclopedia
> anyone can edit - it is sometimes difficult for consistency to emerge.
>
> I agree that something driven by reader choice would be good, but
> still with editorial guidance.
>   

I don't know about full volume length articles, but it's a plausible 
notion. More realistically, traditional encyclopedias took advantage of 
alphabetical order without regard to article size. Thus in the 
Espasa-Calpe "versión" is a 46 page article with all but the first three 
pages being about versions of the Bible. It is immediately preceded by a 
3-line article about Versiola (a village in Italy with population 600), 
and followed by a two line dictionary definition of "versista". In the 
first edition of the EB 30 pages about "navigation" is preceded by two 
lines about the Mexican town of Navidad, and followed by "NAUMACHIA, in 
antiquity, a shew or spectacle among the ancient Romans, representing a 
sea-fight." The 12-volume "Smithsonian Scientific Series of the 1920s 
and 1930s does not call itself an encyclopedia and is not alphabetical, 
yet is encyclopedic in its coverage of science. Jeremy Collier's 
"Dictionary" from 1686 used an alphabetical arrangement, but is really 
encyclopedic in content. The long/short article volumes in the EB is 
very recent since it only started with the 15th edition.

"Wiki is not paper" is a great advantage for linking, and building other 
fantastic connections between articles, but does not handle stubs very 
well. Knowing when to merge a stub into a list is an art that must 
necessarily remain flexible. I don't believe that we should attach too 
much weight to consistency; that too easily becomes an obsession. I have 
no interest in working to make any article "good" or "featured"; if 
others want to take on that challenge they are welcome to do so.  The 
vast majority of articles will still never make it there.  That's fine! 
Consistency is the enemy of creative solutions. In the simplest case 
there may be two equally good ways of presenting a topic. Do we really 
need to insist that one way is better than the other for the sake of 
consistency.  Perhaps in the distant future one may prove better than 
the other, but we cannot now prejudge that.

The readers' choice principle is fine as long as it does not impose 
reader's choice. The big drawback here is that a reader cannot choose 
what he does not know about.  Personal experience has shown that I am in 
a minority when it comes to liking black jellybeans, though I find it 
annoying that the majority who selectively exclude black jellybeans deny 
me the experience of variety when they leave only the black jellybeans 
in the bowl. Some may want that black jellybeans be banned from 
assortments on the grounds that they are forced to pay for something 
they don't want. If that were to happen the people who buy assortments 
may never even know that black jellybeans exist.

Ec