[WikiEN-l] Community vs Encyclopedia

Sat Jun 3 19:00:45 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:
> > >
> > > 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?
> > >
> >
> > The principle of the Wikipedia is that it's a work in progress, surely?
>
> A perpetual work in progress? Do we never want to deliver a "complete"
> first version?
>
> Steve

In my mind it should always be possible to take everything from the
article namespace (substituting in all the images and templates),
throw away everything from all the other namespaces, and be left with
what could legitimately be called "an encyclopedia".  I think that's a
good compromise between immediatism and eventualism, though I suppose
it leans fairly heavily toward immediatism (I favor immediately
removing unsourced assertions from the article namespace).

Everything else (i.e., everything in all the other namespaces)
*should* be reasonably related to the goal of improving "the
encyclopedia" as I just defined, but I tend to take a view that this
rule need not be very strictly enforced.  I think it's especially
important when removing content that might be useful to some other
project to first give others a chance to export/import it.

Anthony