Timwi wrote:
Oh, OK. It's an encyclopedia -- so let's take a look at Wiktionary to
find out what an encyclopedia is:
A reference work (often in several volumes) containing in-depth
articles on various topics (often arranged in alphabetical
order) dealing with a wide range of subjects or with some
particular specialty.
This doesn't seem to exclude any human knowledge, neither explicitly
nor implicitly. What parts of human knowledge should in your view not
be covered in an encyclopedia, and why?
There's an implicit assumption (myself included) that the encyclopedia
is a condensation or summary of knowledge. However, I think this is a
pragmatic position that's developed as a response to the massive
increases in human knowledge - print encyclopedias were never going
to be a million volumes in length to document the contents of
libraries that had grown to multiple millions of volumes. Even
online, 20 million 300-page nonfiction books would turn into some
400 million 30K articles if there's no summarization - a rather
daunting prospect!
Still, it's an interesting thought experiment to take a random
nonfiction book from your shelf and ask "what if I just wikified
the entire contents verbatim".
Stan