[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

Fri Oct 7 21:53:13 UTC 2005

On 7 Oct 2005, at 22:25, Kat Walsh wrote:
> I disagree on this, and I wonder why so many people state it: a good
> encyclopedic article on a broad subject I am only casually acquainted
> with is very useful, and in fact Wikipedia is often the first place
> I'll turn. There are plenty of basic subjects for which I do not know
> most of the information contained in a decent encyclopedia article;
> I'd imagine this is true of most people. (Granted, I didn't go to a
> particularly good school, but even so!)
>
> But even if it is only a stopping-off point -- how will readers find
> the niche subject they really want to find if the main article does
> not lead them there by framing it with appropriate context and general
> information to let them know which subtopic they are looking for? If
> [[dog]] were so lacking as not to say that a young dog is a puppy and
> that the breed that ran by was probably a retriever, it wouldn't be
> much to step off from.

I think there are a lot of usage patterns. Looking at a few kind of
obvious gateways, they have a tendency to degenerate into lists (eg
[[Beer]] that was demoted from FA, [[Architecture]] is terrible, written
like a bad essay with a ==Conclusion== section). In fact the  
architecture
Portal is better, much better (the main problem is the pointltess  
list of
other portals which just wastes space). Maybe these shouldnt be  
turned into
FAs at all, just something more portal like. Brittanica used to
have Micropaedia and Macropaedia in the later print volumes to organise
on different levels.

Justinc