On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 11:25 AM, David Levy <lifeisunf...@gmail.com> wrote: > I wrote: > >> > The English Wikipedia contains individual articles about each >> > of the 144 "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" television episodes. >> > Can you give an example of that in a traditional encyclopedia? > > Anthony replied: > >> That might be a relevant question if we were discussing whether >> or not has television episode guide entries. As it stands we're >> discussing whether or not it has dictionary entries. > > My point is that each of those 144 "episode guide entries" is written > as an encyclopedia article (despite the fact that no traditional > encyclopedia includes such content).
That point is not relevant, though. > Similarly, we have encyclopedia articles about words. The fact that > these subjects traditionally aren't covered in encyclopedias and are > covered in other reference works doesn't automatically mean that their > presence in Wikipedia is purely duplicative of the latter's function. What makes something an "encyclopedia article about a word"? Sounds to me like another way to describe a "dictionary". >> > As implicitly acknowledged in your question, Wikipedia isn't a >> > traditional encyclopedia. > >> And that's my whole point. Wikipedia *does* contain lots of >> dictionary entires, even though there is a page saying that it >> shouldn't. > > Your opinion of what constitutes a "dictionary entry" differs from > that of the English Wikipedia community at large. > > I certainly haven't seen the format in question used in any dictionary > (including Wiktionary). So "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" is a formatting guideline, and not an inclusion guideline? I didn't take it that way, but if you think that's what it says, maybe I should reread it. >> > > And if the concept is the word, shouldn't the title of the >> > > article be [[the word "meh"]]? > >> > Why? > >> Disambiguation. I guess [["meh"]] would be acceptable, though. >> It's not so important with interjections, but any word which is >> a noun would suffer from the problem. [[shithead]] should be >> about shitheads, not the word shithead, just like [[dog]] is >> about dogs, not the word dog. > > We use the format "Foo (word)" or similar when the word itself is not > the primary topic. For example, see "Man (word)". I guess that could work, though it would be nice to have something more standard. Instead I see: *troll (gay slang) *faggot (slang) *Harry (derogatory term) *Oorah (Marines) *Uh-oh (expression) Anyway, not that big a deal. So the next problem I have is that there don't seem to be any notability guidelines. Is the word "computer" notable? If so, why isn't there yet an encyclopedia entry for such a common word? There's certainly quite a lot that can be said about the word. And I guess if "Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary" is more explicit about being a formatting guideline, and not an inclusion guideline, that would then reflect the de facto policy. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
