On 6/3/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/3/06, Joe Anderson
<computerjoe.mailinglist(a)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