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

Tue May 11 21:59:24 UTC 2004

dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

>>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." 
>
Such niceties are not a consideration in the attempts of the VfD crowd 
to maintain the intellectual purity of the Wikipedia.

>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.
>
The word "textbook" is significant.  That's too often their excuse for 
shuffling good encyclopedic material to Wikibooks.

>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.
>
There is some old history from at least 2 years ago favoring a broad 
interpretation to include practical subjects, but I would have a hard 
time finding it.

Ec