[WikiEN-l] Community vs Encyclopedia

Sat Jun 3 18:40:03 UTC 2006

On 6/3/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/3/06, Joe Anderson <computerjoe.mailinglist at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > However, four different viewpoints of the Wikipedia have emerged recently:
> >
> >   - It is an encyclopedia with a community
> >   - It is a community with an encyclopedia
> >   - It is an encyclopedia
> >   - It is a community
>
> Interesting. The dichotomy I most often see, that people have trouble
> deciding on, is :
>
> - Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia
> - Wikipedia is a project to create an encyclopaedia
>
> It's probably more of a naming thing than anything else, but it does
> imply a point of view on whether the encyclopaedia has actually been
> created yet. Is the online version of Wikipedia an encyclopaedia, or
> is it a peek into a work in progress?
>
> Steve

Depending on the context, the term "Wikipedia" is often used to
describe each of those things.  I suppose one could do a study to see
what the predominant usage is.  But this is mainly just a semantical
argument.  Obviously there are many documents served by the
wikipedia.org domain which are not part of the encyclopedia itself.

The saying that "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a ___" is also used
rhetorically to remind people using the resources provided under the
wikipedia.org domain name to focus on the end goal - creating an
encyclopedia.

There are a number of people who don't realize that the reason
Wikipedia was created was to build and distribute a free encyclopedia.
 There are a smaller number that realize this and still want to change
it.  This latter group will most likely fail - there are way more
people committed to sticking to the main goal.

Frankly, I don't think there are many (if any) people on this mailing
list who don't agree that anything not related to building an
encyclopedia should be kept off of *.wikipedia.org (with the possible
exception of sep11.wikipedia.org which was sort of grandfathered in).
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think there's much of a
dichotomy in the first place.

Anthony