Can you remember which French encyclopedias did that elaborate scheme. It sounds interesting.
The difference with Wikipedia is the possibilities of linkage and transclusions and differing formats available in a digital encyclopedia, but the downside is the inconsistency in the solutions devised and discarded and reinvented over the years in an encyclopedia anyone can edit - it is sometimes difficult for consistency to emerge. I agree that something driven by reader choice would be good, but still with editorial guidance. Carcharoth On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 4:39 PM, David Goodman <[email protected]> wrote: > We will never solve the problem of structuring--different > encyclopedias at various times have done it quite opposite. (Some > French encyclopedias have even consisted of 5 or 6 very long volume > length articles, divided in an elaborate scheme to a number of > subsections. Recall that the print Brittanica for many years was > divided into two separate parts, one with long articles, one with > short ones--and with many subjects having a different article in each > section. > > In an electronic encyclopedia using structured information, and > sufficiently elaborate metadata and frameworks, to provide the > different frameworks, the reader would be able to convert back and > forth between separated and combined formats, just like an electronic > map can display one or more layers . > > The problem is not structure. The problem is that people take having a > separate article as an indicator of importance, and will continue to > do so. Readers have expectations, and we write for them, not > ourselves, so we need to conform to what they expect of an > encyclopedia format. > > But another problem is content: in an open edited encyclopedia with no > enforceable editorial guidelines, experience shows that the content of > individual items in long articles will tend to shorten, and combining > into large articles loses information. When there are short articles, > people tend to want to make them longer, and they look for and add > information--information sometimes in unencyclopedic detail. > > We are spending far too much time debating over structure of > individual articles--it would be much better to have fixed conventions > for different types of articles, and everyone write to them. > Deliberately taking a field I do not work in, we could for example > decide that all the athletic teams of a college will be grouped in one > article separate from the college, regardless of importance and > regardless of how how long or short the resulting article is. Or we > could decide that for some sports, such as football, we would always > make a separate article if there were a varsity team. Either way, > people would know where to write the material. (I am not advocating > for doing either one of them, except to say that either one would be > simpler to deal with than a mixture, and after their first experience > with the encyclopedia, people would know where to look. > > > according to reader choice. > David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG > > > > On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 9:04 AM, Carcharoth <[email protected]> > wrote: >> On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Charles Matthews >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> <snip> >> >>> Some of the more high-profile associated topics of >>> notable topic X can be mentioned in the article on X, but that doesn't >>> mean they are all worth a separate article. Such decisions should go >>> case-by-case, but in general terms they are about structuring of >>> content, rather than permissible content. >> >> Structuring of content is an interesting question. Sometimes small >> stubs are better than a list, as it is easier to link to separate >> articles than to items in a list, especially if there is no real >> unifying structure for the list. Sometimes it takes a while to work >> out what list, or summary article, something should be part of, but if >> done well, that can work well. >> >> But sometimes separate articles is the way to go. Even if the >> individual articles are unlikely to be much more than a GA-level >> article at best, the separate articles approach has several >> advantages, even if some content gets duplicated across several >> articles. >> >> Carcharoth >> >> _______________________________________________ >> WikiEN-l mailing list >> [email protected] >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >> > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
