[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia

[Anthere]

Daniel Mayer a écrit:
> --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>>Just for the record, I think Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia. ant
> 
> 
> Just for the record, you are mistaken. Have you seen all the niche topics we
> cover in great detail? 
> 
> -- mav

It is *not* because they exist that I approve them. My thoughts still 
have the right to be mine, and I do not believe you have the right to 
tell me that my thoughts are mistakes. A personal opinion is never a 
mistake, what would be a mistake here would be to force this opinion on 
others.

My feeling is that Wikipedia *should* be a general encyclopedia, but I 
am certainly not gonna remove great articles which go into details. Of 
course not.

Allow me to not necessarily agree by default with what is currently done.

We obviously do not have the same feeling toward what Wikipedia should 
be exactly. On some points, we have consensus, such as Wikipedia is not 
a forum of discussion.
On others, it is not so obvious. The claim en.wikipedia is not a 
dictionnary is not a claim I personnally recognise as valid, because the 
french tradition is to mix dictionnaries and encyclopedia much more than 
english-speaking people do. As far as I am concerned, all encyclopedic 
articles should contain dictionnary information.

However, some people do not think so and I recognise they are benefits 
to the existence of wiktionnaries as well, mostly for translation I 
think. Still, the two projects, encyclopedia and wiktionnaries are 
strongly overlapping sometimes, and *two* projects exist nonetheless. 
And I saw very few people objecting to the wiktionary existence, nor to 
the overlap.

Consequently, let me repeat I think Wikipedia SHOULD be a general 
encyclopedia, and articles thought for rather general public, ie, avoid 
going in length into jargon and very detailed information. Which is why 
I am not entirely happy with the idea of filling up the article on the 
tiger with all the information we are talking about. An article on tiger 
should be kept relativement simple itself.

I perfectly agree for detailed semi-professional articles to stay in 
Wikipedia. I wrote a couple of them. However, they should be rather in 
separate articles, the main one staying readable for most readers. The 
more detailed ones being seen as "to go further".

If you fill up the tiger article with very detailed information, you 
will flood the average reader. If the detailed information is in another 
article, more specialised, only the specialist will go and read it, and 
the casual reader will not get scared. The detailed article could be on 
Wikipedia or on another project, it does not matter very much, as long 
as the two projects are tightly linked. But all info in one article is 
just a bad idea. Imho.

Anthere