[WikiEN-l] Re: Historian: origin of apparent "policy" re

Tue May 11 20:42:08 UTC 2004

>From: Imran Ghory <imran at bits.bris.ac.uk>

>The central basis on which I argue on vfd when these things come up is
>that wikipedia should be descriptive not prescriptive. Instructive works
>come under the remit of wikibooks so that is where they should go.

>So a description of how a food is made is encyclopedic, but instructions
>on how to make that food are not encyclopedic.

Yes, that's a nice clear bright-line _distinction_, but the problem is that 
apparently there is NOT a consensus or a policy that "wikipedia should be 
descriptive not prescriptive." 

Quoting from the American Heritage Dictionary, the word "encyclopedia" is 
derived from 'enkuklios paideia, made up of enkuklios, "cyclical, periodic, 
ordinary," and paideia, "education," and meaning "general education." 
Copyists of Latin manuscripts took this phrase to be a single Greek word, 
enkuklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the 
New Latin word encyclopaedia, coming into English with the sense "general 
course of instruction," first recorded in 1531.'  

Encyclopedia = "everything-teacher" or "general course of instruction" or 
"universal textbook of everything." That doesn't exclude prescriptive 
articles in my opinion.

Well, OK, I didn't really want to argue the point here, so this will be my 
last word on this. I just wanted to know if there was some history, 
consensus, policy on this that, as a newcomer, I didn't know about.