[WikiEN-l] Descriptive/proscriptive

Sat May 15 16:30:42 UTC 2004

Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

>
> Consider the passage from the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition 
> which I will present later below. The whole article about the 
> telegraph is full of detailed circuit diagrams and mechanical diagrams 
> at a level which goes _far_ beyond the schematic illustration of basic 
> principles. Much of the Britannica 11th is at what might be called the 
> engineering-handbook level of depth and detail. From the information 
> given in "Telegraph" article, you could almost build a "Varley's 
> Double Cup insulator," or wire up a sounder for duplex working by 
> either the differential method or the bridge method.
>
Something to consider is that as the total volume of knowledge has
increased, the publishers of print encyclopedias have had to make
some hard choices about what to include and what to leave out. (Of
course, they gloss over that, it sounds so - so - *tradesman*-like.)
The oldest encyclopedias seem to have a lot of recipe-like and other
mundane details (like preferred techniques for catching different
kinds of fish), but over time scientific, geographic, and historical
information would have tended to crowd out less-critical material,
since it would have been impossible to sell 500-volume print
encyclopedias.

On recipes specifically, I suspect that some of the objection is to
recipes with no supporting content. To me, a bald recipe for chocolate
cake is like a substub or an uncaptioned picture; I want to know who
thought of chocolate cake first, why some have flour and some don't,
etc. Auntie B's recipe is not encyclopedic for the same reason that
Auntie B herself isn't, there's just not much to say, but it would
make a fine "illustration" for the chocolate cake article:

    '''Chocolate cake''' is [[cake]] containing [[chocolate]]. First
    mentioned in a Dutch cookbook of 1675, [etc].

    The following recipe is from Fannie Farmer ca 1921:

    <recipe1>

    A more modern recipe:

    <recipe2>

Now is anybody going to want to come along and delete the recipes
from such an article?

Stan