[Foundation-l] When is a Wikipedia not a Wikipedia ?

Mon Apr 14 18:32:02 UTC 2008

On 14/04/2008, Jesse Martin (Pathoschild) <pathoschild at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

>  >  Sounds like a good plan, but (as others have said) it shouldn't be
>  >  called "Wikipedia". It's no more an encyclopaedia than it is a
>  >  dictionary (etc) - they're using "Wikipedia" as the name because it's
>  >  the best known, which doesn't sound like a good reason to me. The name
>  >  should reflect the contents.

> As I recall, Wikisource and Wiktionary were originally part of
>  Wikipedia. They were split off because there was enough community to
>  maintain them separately, and they felt they were better separately.
>  Here we have an opposite situation; the community feels they don't
>  have the resources to maintain them separately, and have decided to
>  unmerge them for that language. Another user has already pointed out
>  that Wikiversity was originally part of Wikibooks as well.

Exactly - the separation was for English Wikipedia's internal needs,
rather than something fundamental about the definition of
"encyclopedia".

>  I think that within reasonable limits a community should decide for
>  itself what its criteria for inclusion are. There's no need to
>  strictly follow the example of the English wikis. An encyclopedia can
>  certainly include supporting quotations, texts, teaching materials, et
>  cetera. These aren't typically found in paper encyclopedias due to
>  limitations in the expert model (limited work hours available) and
>  paper form (limited size) and a lack of ambition, not because they're
>  inherently incompatible.

Yes. You couldn't say that an encyclopedia wasn't an encyclopedia
because it included dictionary definitions or even an appendix of
source documents or how-to's.

- d.