Yeah, but the EB hates Wikipedia with a passion, Expert != Neutral. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Sidaway" <f.crdfa(a)gmail.com> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org> Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 4:21 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Guardian article about Wikipedia

On 10/24/05, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: That sounds pretty sensible. The linear form of the article can be exploited for organisation. If relatively trivial sections of the article are placed further down, it doesn't matter much if they become a little bloated. On the question of style, I'd say that the section in question could be rewritten as one or two sentences to the effect that the ae form derives from a romanization of the alpha-iota diphthong, major dictionaries in UK and US describe both ae and e forms as acceptable spellings, and the ae form is preserved primarily in the latin titles of some encyclopedias. The rest is just filling.

On 10/24/05, Justin Cormack <justin(a)specialbusservice.com> wrote: Actually his point wasn't that we should produce 26,000 words. It was rather that by contrast to the Britannica article of that length, ours runs to a mere 2000. This is surprisingly short, given the subject. If we can manage 750 words on Squeaky Fromme, why so few on Encyclopedia?

Snowspinner wrote: I dug out a copy of Britannica to look at their article, and that's a big part of the word difference: While we give a high-level overview of the history of the encyclopedia, and break out individual detailed histories into their own articles, Britannica gives a long narrative exposition on the history of the encyclopedia, not entirely unlike what you would get if you merged all those articles back into the main one. That certainly accounts for the history portion of the Britannica article, anyway, which is a pretty good proportion of the wordcount. -Mark

On 24/10/05, Justin Cormack <justin(a)specialbusservice.com> wrote: No, you read carefully. He says "I am not familiar with the Aquitaine language but would be very surprised if it bore any relation to Euskera, the Basque language." Such a language is recorded (it's now extinct so of course he doesn't speak it), and does indeed appear to bear some relation to Basque, although not much of it is attested. If he was rejecting the proposed connection, that would be fair enough, but instead he is (in admitted ignorance) rejecting any possibility of a link. Anyone who knows anything about Acquitanian knows about the possible link with Basque, he's just dismissing it out of hand. -- Abi