After reading your email posted up to this mailing list, I have browsed the webpages provided in your email. I am suspicious about your accuracy on the comment concerning about encyclopedia having prescriptive articles. I am writing to give you one very important point: the articles which contain definitions of words are from Wiktionary (URL: www.wiktionary.org <http://www.wiktionary.org/> ), which is a branch project of the Wikimedia. Wikipedia is only providing a link to the webpage in Wiktionary. Therefore Wikipedia does not contain prescriptive articles as you accused. Although there are articles linked from the webpages containing lists in the Wikipedia itself, they are not giving definitions of the phrases. Even if it provides definitions of phrases, they are mostly in foreign languages other than English, thus it is difficult to find them from myriad of dictionaries. I cannot find a point to urge the community to delete the webpages. Encyclopedia is a great collection of knowledge. Even if some content is not useful to particular person(s), there is no need to delete them unless they are not decent. There is not any sound reason to object knowledge accumulation. Last but not least, please *read carefully before you make an accusation*. It is absolutely unwise to shout out complaints without sufficient proof to support them. You better look before you leap. Otherwise, you will be the one who is embarrassed if your naive, childish, and incomprehensive accusations finally light up the anger of the public. Good luck to you if you are going to continue with such kind of behaviour. Brian Chau -----Original Message----- From: Guettarda [mailto:guettarda@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, July 31, 2006 6:11 AM To: English Wikipedia Subject: [WikiEN-l] Lists of words It would appear that lists of words violate the provision that Wikipedia should not have articles which define individual words, nor should it include Lists of such definitions. However, we have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_words , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_slang and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_phrases , among others. Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive. Is this policy still being applied (in which case, *all* of these articles must be deleted), or not (in which case the wording of the policy needs to be changed). I have raised the issue at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Lists_of_W ords I don't know if all of these articles need to be deleted, or whether policy needs to be modified to reflect reality. But I think this needs to be determined in general, not determined piecemeal Ian

Guettarda wrote: When Wiktionary was formed it was intended to be complementary to Wikipedia in this direction. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that there would be some degree of overlap. When I randomly view some of these lists I find that there is no one solution to determmining which belong on which project. There are some that clearly belong on Wiktionary like the [[List of idioms in the Portuguese language <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_idioms_in_the_Portuguese_language>]], but there are many others that are specialized glossaries that could do well in either project as long as there is proper linkage. Perhaps the most significant factor would be whether there is something about the items on the list that would not be found in an ordinary advanced dictionary. Defining words is perfectly acceptable in Wikipedia, and stubs which have a future beyond the definition should also be acceptable. It's in the nature of policy to be prescriptive as long as people treat it as something to be enforced. A purely descriptive policy is a guideline that reflects what is actually happening, and suggests what people might do. The best approach would be to consider each of these articles one-by-one. Ec