[WikiEN-l] That's a Micropaedia

Thu Sep 15 18:51:01 UTC 2005

From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport at bluebottle.com>

>Actually on "one-line articles", my preference 
>is for articles (or at least article intros) 
>that can fit into the first screen. This is an
>internet encyclopedia and if you can't say 
>something useful in the first
>paragraph then the reader will wander off 
>to another site.  If an article
>can be written well as a single sentence, 
>I think that's a good
>thing--indeed an ideal to aim for.

"Article intros that can fit into the first screen." Oh, absolutely, by all 
means. 

Now I'm going to pretend that I didn't read that key qualification and tear 
off onto a rant.

ARTICLES that can fit into one screen? No, no, no. That's not an 
encyclopedia, that's the Britannica MICROpaedia. 

An encyclopedia is not about data, it's about knowledge. 

An encyclopedia's job is to make knowledge _accessible_. An encyclopedia 
explains. An encyclopedia _instructs_. That's what the "-pedia" part is all 
about. An encyclopedia is supposed to synthesize and make sense of topics. 

Why on earth does my public library's reference room even have an 
encyclopedia in it? (Several, in fact). 

Why would anyone look up something in a twenty-volume encyclopedia when the 
library as a whole contains fifteen hundred times as many volumes? There 
probably isn't a single topic in the encyclopedia that isn't better dealt 
with in some standalone book. And it's just as easy for me to find that book 
in the library's computerized catalog as it is for me to open the 
encyclopedia's index.

So why do I use the library's encyclopedia?

Because the encyclopedia is selective, and because it synthesizes. Because 
when I don't want to read all the way through a 1,000 page book about the 
Bounty mutineers, it tells me about as much as I need and want to know. 

Also, I know that the encyclopedia is going to present some broadly accepted 
mainstream view of the Bounty mutiny. If I just go to the history shelves, 
unless I first spend some time looking up book reviews, I won't know whether 
I'm reading a "standard" account or whether it's some kind of revisionist 
account with an axe to grind.

After I get _oriented_ by reading an encyclopedia article on the Bounty, or 
quadratic equations, or the history of jazz, then I'm ready to move on to the 
rest of the library.

(Now, the Micropaedia is about a third of the Britannica's total content. And 
a Micropaedia article is typically about, well, one screen. So, OK if someone 
wants to suggest that an appropriate balance for Wikipedia is for about a 
third of its content to be one-screen articles, OK).