[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia spanks Encarta, Brockhaus

Mon Oct 4 09:14:53 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>This is sadly true and I'm part of the problem since I love to write about
>specific topics concerning geology yet have never added much to core
>geology-related articles such as [[geology]] or [[mineralogy]]. This also seems
>to be true for articles about specific species (we have many well-developed
>ones) vs articles about core biology-related topics (not many well-developed
>ones). 
>  
>
I think this may be because writing those "easy" articles is actually 
*harder*, even though they're more common in general encyclopedias.  I 
can write a pretty good article about any specific topic in computer 
science, and many in philosophy, given my background knowledge and a bit 
of research.  But writing [[computer science]] or [[philosophy]] (or 
even a sub-topic, like [[philosophy of mind]] or [[artificial 
intelligence]]) is much, much harder.

Fortunately, we're not the only ones who find it so.  Our general 
articles are lacking compared to other encyclopedias, but none really 
have well-respected ones.  If you take an article in Britannica on a 
general topic, like [[geology]] or [[biology]] or [[computer science]], 
and show it to someone in the field, 90% of the time the person is going 
to think it's a crappy article that misses the point in some important 
way, or leaves out something crucial.  Of course, if that person writes 
what they think is a better summary (and many do, in the form of 
textbooks), generally only some of the field will agree it's a better 
summary, and a significant percentage will think *that* description 
sucks too.  It's very hard to do an NPOV description of such broad 
topics that's at the same time readable as an intro...

-Mark