[Wikipedia-l] Re: A parallel World Wide Web?

Wed Jun 2 23:49:01 UTC 2004

Timwi wrote:

>
> Oh, OK. It's an encyclopedia -- so let's take a look at Wiktionary to 
> find out what an encyclopedia is:
>
>     A reference work (often in several volumes) containing in-depth
>     articles on various topics (often arranged in alphabetical
>     order) dealing with a wide range of subjects or with some
>     particular specialty.
>
> This doesn't seem to exclude any human knowledge, neither explicitly 
> nor implicitly. What parts of human knowledge should in your view not 
> be covered in an encyclopedia, and why?

There's an implicit assumption (myself included) that the encyclopedia
is a condensation or summary of knowledge. However, I think this is a
pragmatic position that's developed as a response to the massive
increases in human knowledge - print encyclopedias were never going
to be a million volumes in length to document the contents of
libraries that had grown to multiple millions of volumes. Even
online, 20 million 300-page nonfiction books would turn into some
400 million 30K articles if there's no summarization - a rather
daunting prospect!

Still, it's an interesting thought experiment to take a random
nonfiction book from your shelf and ask "what if I just wikified
the entire contents verbatim".

Stan