Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It is a website where people are trying to create an encyclopedia.
There are lots of long arguments that could be engaged in to prove this point, but there is also a relatively simple one. Pick a page in the talk namespace, or the Wikipedia namespace, or the Wikipedia talk namespace, or the User namespace, or the User talk namespace. These pages are all part of Wikipedia. But they are surely not part of an encyclopedia.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Well I don't know about that…pick up a notepad from someone's desk at Encyclopedia Brittanica, or a photo of their kids; those aren't part of an encyclopedia, either.
Or, click the "contact us" link or the "about us" link at a newspaper's web site; those aren't news, but they don't negate the site's status as a news source.
With Wikipedia, if you do an internal search, or click most any link, you will wind up at an encyclopedia article. Same goes for a Google or Yahoo search. So, I don't really agree with your assessment.
"pick up a notepad from someone's desk at Encyclopedia Brittanica, or a photo of their kids; those aren't part of an encyclopedia, either."
Sure, but they're not part of Brittanica, either.
"Or, click the "contact us" link or the "about us" link at a newspaper's web site; those aren't news, but they don't negate the site's status as a news source."
I don't dispute that Wikipedia is an encyclopedic source. But it's not an encyclopedia, just like "a newspaper's web site" is not "a newspaper".
"With Wikipedia, if you do an internal search, or click most any link, you will wind up at an encyclopedia article."
Maybe the problem here is that the term "Wikipedia" has multiple meanings. One meaning being the entire website, and the other meaning being just the encyclopedia articles.
But that's not the way the term is used. Even Wikipedia's own article on Wikipedia calls it an "encyclopedia project", though I suppose this is subject to change at any moment.
Even if you do use the term "Wikipedia" to refer solely to the collection of articles, it's still awfully strange to call it an "encyclopedia", because that collection of articles changes multiple times every single second. Your "newspaper" example comes to mind. Can you think of an online "newspaper" which is nothing more than an online collection of newspaper articles with no central control? Is Wikinews "a newspaper"?
Can you come up with a reasonable definition of "encyclopedia" which includes "Wikipedia", but doesn't include things which obviously aren't encyclopedias? According to Wikipedia, "An encyclopedia (or encyclopædia) is a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge." That's probably as close as you can get, but is Wikipedia a compendium? Is Wikipedia "concise, yet comprehensive"?
That's an interesting question. I'd say Wikipedia is not concise, but I suppose if you rearranged the "notability" standards a bit it could be.
What you say is interesting. I read your initial post as a criticism, which I think now was my misinterpretation, yes?
I'm pretty sure nobody would claim that non-articlespace stuff is part of what they refer to as the "encyclopedia." The fact that it's on the Wikipedia web site doesn't mean that it's part of the Wikipedia encyclopedia. I guess that's a simpler way of making the point I was trying to make before. As you say, the name "Wikipedia" is used to refer to different things.
I guess I'd say Wikipedia is a unique kind of thing, so it stands to reason that it wouldn't fit neatly into preexisting categories. You're quite right, the word is used to denote different things -- the "encyclopedia", the web site, the community.
As to the word "concise" -- I think the online nature of Wikipedia makes concicesness less significant than it used to be. There can be extensive biographies of porn stars and Pokemon characters, without negatively impacting the practical conciseness for someone with no interest in those subjects; as long as each topic is concise with relation to the desires of readers of that topic, I'd say WP would still meet the definition. (Not to say WP meets that benchmark.)
Would you agree that the Wikipedia community aspires to produce an encyclopedia?
My statement is not meant to be a negative criticism of the project itself. I don't think there's anything wrong per se with not being an encyclopedia.
My initial point is that "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia" does not make sense because there are so many parts which are clearly "Wikipedia" but are clearly not "an encyclopedia". But I think the statement fails beyond that, and that this becomes clear when trying to define what exactly *is* "the encyclopedia".
After writing my last response I read over WikipediaIsNotAnEncyclopedia at Meatballwiki. I disagree with much of the commentary on both sides of the argument, but Adina Levin made a point which I think gets at the heart of my problem with calling Wikipedia an encyclopedia.
"The second -- that wikipedia has no externally-bestowed, centrally-authorized formal authority is a much more interesting objection. This argument seems similar to the contention that a democratic government -- since it has no king -- can't be called a government at all. I would argue rather that wikipedia may be evolving an alternative means of creating authoritative information, similar to the way that democracy provides an alternative means of creating authoritative leadership."
I think that's what I'm getting at when I say that Wikipedia fails the "concise" test. It's not that there are articles on porn stars and Pokemon characters in it, it's that there's no authority in place to determine whether or not there should be articles on porn stars and Pokemon characters in it. I don't think you can waive this argument away by saying that Wikipedia is analogous to a democracy, though.
I guess what I'm trying to say is this. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. At any moment in time the Wikipedia article namespace is not an encyclopedia either. The vast majority of the core Wikipedia community work to make the Wikipedia article namespace more like an encyclopedia, but they allow a group of outsiders to constantly add things to it which are not part of an encyclopedia.
With this in mind, would I "agree that the Wikipedia community aspires to produce an encyclopedia?" Not quite. I'd agree that the vast majority of the core Wikipedia community aspires to produce "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit", but that this is impossible because "anyone can edit" is not compatible with "encyclopedia" (since "encyclopedia" implies selection, and "anyone can edit" implies lack of selection). And if I am correct that these two are not compatible, then I'd guess that most of the Wikipedia core community would rather drop the "encyclopedia" part than the "anyone can edit" part.
All this said, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that. Wikipedia can be useful without being "an encyclopedia". If nothing else, others can always come along and create "an encyclopedia" from "Wikipedia". In fact, it has already been done.
Rephrasing above, I'd say the core Wikipedia community strives to create "the closest thing to an encyclopedia that can be created while allowing anyone to edit". "Anyone can edit" seems to be the top priority, and "encyclopedia" takes a close second.
Post a Comment