On 5/24/05, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>
wrote:
there have been dozens of lengthy bibliographies
published on [[George
Washington]]'s life, and there's a wealth of other material out there,
including scholarly debate on relatively minor points of his life; in
principle, our treatment of him could include all this, expanding to the
point where it consists of maybe 300-400 pages of text. Good idea? Bad
idea?
I think this would be a bad idea. A core principle of Wikipedia is
that it is an encyclopedia, and, despite the lack of size limitations,
this principle should still lead us to aim at something which is
closer to a traditional encyclopedia than to a text book, biography,
or any other other form of resource. It may, however, have a place
within Wikibooks.
That's my own intuition, but I have trouble figuring out how to actually
distinguish between what we do now and that eventuality. I'm not
altogether *sure* it's a bad idea either, especially if things can be
broken down into useful chunks. For example, [[George Washington at
blah]] or [[Controversy over the color of George Washington's
slippers]]. I mean, if we collated all our Pokemon-related pages
(pardon the obvious example), we probably have a small books' worth of
material written on Pokemon already...
-Mark