[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Stopping the presses:, Britannica to stop printing books

[Ziko van Dijk]

Dear Robin,

There are several reasons for making a text not too long. Pity with
the reader is one of them.

I personally try to be reluctant with generalizations about Wikipeda
language versions. They usually are not true. It's often like the
thing that the grass in the neighbour's yard is greener.

Kind regards
Ziko



Robin:
I find it bizarre that inclusion of information of local importance is
encouraged in the internationalized local language wikipediae but
discouraged in the U.S. English wikipedia.  So events of local
interest in a town in Romania are desirable but the same cannot be
said of a similar event in San Jose, California.




2012/3/14 Robin McCain <robin at slmr.com>:
> Why did the articles in Brittania keep getting shorter? Because printing on
> paper costs money. Storage on the Internet is  free by comparison. - So why
> do our editors insist on reducing what might be an interesting article down
> to something so brief it might as well be on paper in a book that will be
> recycled in a few years - or deleting content completely?
>
> This whole idea of editing for brevity and notability came from the
> TRADITIONAL encyclopedia business...  Wikipedia was supposed to be the
> opposite - big enough to include anything of importance to people.
>
> It is socially and historically interesting to compare very old edition of
> Brittanica to a newer edition. For example: an entry on battleships would
> evolve from a discussion of wooden ships powered by sail that enforced
> seapower of an empire to sidewheelers, to iron ships fired by coal to the
> current thinking that battleships are too expensive. In an online
> encyclopedia it is possible to include all these articles side by side into
> a section on the evolution of battleships.
>
> I find it bizarre that inclusion of information of local importance is
> encouraged in the internationalized local language wikipediae but
> discouraged in the U.S. English wikipedia.  So events of local interest in a
> town in Romania are desirable but the same cannot be said of a similar event
> in San Jose, California.
>
> On 3/14/2012 1:15 AM, foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
>>
>> But I started getting frustrated with them when I was about 12 or 13,
>> because the shorter articles rarely answered the questions I had, and I
>> never happened t be looking up something with one of the longer
>> articles...
>
>
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Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland
dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter
http://wmnederland.nl/
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