From: James Duffy
Absolutely correct. Encyclopædic articles are not simply limited by
paper
but by a range of other issues; readability, context,
comprendability,
communicative structure, layout, etc. Extraordinarily complex topics
need
a
lot of space; World Wars I and II, Vietnam War, intellectual concepts,
major
historical facts, etc but except in extreme cases we need to keep
biographies readable, not turn them into theses simply because we
don't
have
a paper usgae limit. Saying 'lets get everything we can in because we
can'
isn't encyclopædic, it is amateurish.
No, actually "encyclopedic", in its root meaning, is "including
everything".
Encylopædias communicate themes,
movements, contexts, relevances, not a 'fling the whole lot in'
approach..
We
have books to do that. An encyclopædia fulfils a different educational
role.
A dead-tree encyclopedia fulfils a different educational role. Wikipedia
is not a dead-tree encyclopedia.
Your argument conflates trying to include everything in Wikipedia with
making impossibly long articles.
That is fallacious.
It is TRUE that people should avoid making super-long articles because
of readability, editability, etc.
It is FALSE that people should avoid adding tons of content because of
the problems of super-long articles.
There should be a limit on the length of entries; if not formally
enforced, then informally.
A method of automagically linking associated articles in an intelligent
manner would be a helpful (though complicated to implement) tool.