[WikiEN-l] All information?

Thu Sep 15 13:35:35 UTC 2005

On 15/09/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:

> I thought that there was consensus that Wikipedia a) is an encyclopedia, and
> b) is not "an indiscriminate collection of information." 

I must say, I'm sure I've read: "Imagine a world where every single
person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. We don't
have to imagine it. We're doing it" attributed to Jimbo, and I have
never squared that with "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection
of information."

Personally, I don't mind indiscriminate information - that's what the
whole world wide web is. Search engines like Google have made it their
mission to make it usable, and I don't see why Wikipedia need be any
different in our little web-within-the-web. (Tagging - which is what
our categorisation could be seen as - seems to be the other approach,
but as far as I can tell that's more hype than useful).

Dan