[Wikipedia-l] National Public Radio (US): "Wikipedia's Growth Comes with Concerns"

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Henry Tan-Tenn <share2002nov at lomaji.com> wrote:

> NPR's Weekend Edtion has run an article on Wikipedia, focusing on the
> usual pro/con views.
> 
> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4506421
> 
> This follows 2003's "All Things Considered" article:
> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1344426

Nice story. It focuses on our strong points and on areas where we need more
work (aside: which could be helped-along by some type of approved article
system and then outreach to librarians and educators). 

The new Britannica FUD was interesting: Their new take is that Wikipedia is too
detailed and one of the things that makes EB great is that they make careful
decisions on what is most important to include. 

So that looks to me like they are giving up and declaring their much smaller
size and long time between updates to be 'features.' :) 

What they have lost grip of is that Wikipedia is redefining what an
encyclopedia can be or even what one should be. 

That said, we do need to make sure that long articles are started with
good-sized lead sections that give a quick summary of the topic (we might even
want to encourage larger lead sections so they could approach the size of
concise encyclopedia articles in their own right). We also need to make sure
long articles do not present more detail on a page that is appropriate for that
level of article and to make sure that the detail stays on-topic. 

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lead_section
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Summary_style

-- mav


	
		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. 
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail