[WikiEN-l] Re: help me

Wed May 19 21:54:21 UTC 2004

On Wed, 19 May 2004 05:56:14 -0600, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>You are definitely in the right place, althought there are other right
>places such as the Villge Pump.
>
>On the surface (I am no programmer, but many who read this list are) your
>arguement is persuasive, but so is the arguement of your opponents who take
>the position that the level of detail you are going into is inappropriate
>for an ecyclopedia.

How do we decide what is appropriate for an encyclopedia?  
Traditional encyclopedias, such as Britannica, were written on
paper, and had intrinsic size constrains to what could be put in.  
They couldn't hope to cover anything but a small proportion of human
knowledge, so they had to be very selective.

Wikipedia faces no such limitations. If we choose to do so, we can 
make an encyclopedia with a much larger scope than any other. Take, 
for example living things: science has named about 3  million unique 
species. Some of these are already in Wikipedia and it's possible 
that in years to come most of these will be in Wikipedia -- which 
IMO would be a good thing.

Recipes are another issue which involves the same considerations.

Back to this matter of software APIs, my gut feeling is that they 
don't really belong in Wikipedia, (but I can see the argument of 
those who would disagree). It may be that the OpenFacts wiki that I 
mentioned in another post is a better place for them.

>However in many other areas, even more detailed expositions are present and
>planned for encyclopedia, generally, no town is so small, no King so
>obscure, and especially, no bird so extinct that it does not deserve an
>article.

Indeed.

One needs to bear in mind that tradional encyclopedias have tended 
to prefer academic knowledge to practical knowledge; therefore a 
long-dead monarch was deemed more important than how to build a 
brick wall or program a computer.

-- 
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than 
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)  