QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 24th June 2009, 3:22pm)
QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Tue 23rd June 2009, 10:03pm)
QUOTE(Casliber @ Tue 23rd June 2009, 11:40pm)
I am also not necessarily convinced that is a problem as the primary objective is still writing an encyclopedia.
I remain to be convinced of that. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia (at least not one that any sensible person would be proud of), nor is it (as far as I can tell) getting any closer to being one. Its policies have been trending away from, not toward, positions that I would think likely to be conducive to the production of encyclopedic content, especially with the extremely strong (but very inconsistently enforced) proscription against editorial synthesis, which is, for all intents and purposes, the gravamen of the encyclopedia form.
Did you get that, Casliber? She's right and it's a devastating return. The POINT of any encyclopedia is to be sythethic (that's close to the definition of what an encylopedia article IS), and yet, speaking strictly, you've outlawed this. In your incredibly hypocritical way, your entire enterprise as Wikipedia survives ONLY upon the work of people who explicitly violate your rules in order to continue it. Many of us have realized this for years, and said it to you regularly.
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But you ignore it. You're required to ignore it as part of the faith.
That one of the weirdest things about Wikipedia. It's certainly on my short-list of the "single mad belief" which qualifies an enterprise as a "religion." You know-- the one belief (like body thetans detectable with an E-meter), that's patently nutso, but that you're all officially required not to notice IS nutso? As part of the deal?
Hmmm, obviously synthesis is a fluid and multilevelled concept. Yes a whole article is a synthesis of sentences of sorts, but it is the micro-level, where one has fact 'a' and fact 'b' and is unable to connect them if the evidence is lacking. This OR safeguard works well in medical articles, where one has to be careful before jumping to conclusions if the proper evidence is lacking. My understanding of an encyclopedia was to
report or
reflect on current knowledge of a term, rather than synthesise new ideas as such.
Cas
This post has been edited by Casliber: