[Wikipedia-l] 80,000

[Lars Aronsson]

Gareth Owen wrote:
> Because they're not encyclopedia articles.
> They're entries from a gazetteer.
>
> One could dump a PD dictionary into wikipedia, and each article would be more
> informative than many stubs.  But wikipedia is not a dictionary.
>
> Its not a gazetteer, either.

I cannot quite understand what makes this orthodox/exclusive/purist
point of view so attractive.  By your definition, would Diderot's
encyclopedia qualify as an encyclopedia?  If not, is that good or bad
for your definition?

Diderot's vision (which seems to have been shared by Vannevar Bush,
Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee) was to *include* all of the world's
knowledge into one (net-)work, and *not* to exclude knowledge that
could be called geographic (gazetteer) or lingustic (dictionary).  How
could they be so wrong (what idiots!), when your own (and Larry's)
purist wisdom should have been obvious to them?

So much of the distinction between these kinds of reference works were
forced upon their creators by the limitations of the print medium.
With the World Wide Web we are no longer bound by these limitations.
Only our preconceived notions, our prejudice bind us now.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik
  Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxköping, Sweden
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/