4 ms·
It's an encyclopedia; its content should be encyclopedic. A website that holds on to everything else would be something different. While that's also fine, it'
by Amorymeltzer 9y ago
It's an encyclopedia; its content should be encyclopedic. A website that holds on to everything else would be something different. While that's also fine, it's a different project with a different goal.
- jamesrcole 9y agoI know citing definitions only gets you so far, but the first definition Google provides for encyclopedic is "comprehensive in terms of information."
- yoz-y 9y agoIf the content starts to touch topics which are too niche, there is a risk that no-one will be able to verify it and the information will become unreliable.
- Double_a_92 9y agoWhere would be a good place to actually store that niche knowledge? I agree that it doesn't really belong on Wikipedia... But it could still be valuable. Maybe even more valuable than "normal" content because if it's lost it's lost for good.
- hobofan 9y agoMaybe Wikidata if the knowledge can be expressed in a somewhat structured way? They don't have the deletion as Wikipedia does, AFAIK.
- yoz-y 9y agoIn an ideal world, on the free decentralized web of interconnected webpages indexed by search engines and archived in several places for posterity. In the current state, I suppose something like Wikia but for anything? It definitely deserves some place.
- seiferteric 9y agoAmazingly I got useful information on an angelfire website the other day... hope things like that stay around forever.
- JetSpiegel 9y agoBlog it and crawl it with the Internet Archive
- gowld 9y agowikia.com? Your own wiki? Talk pages on Wikipedia?
- logfromblammo 9y agoBut the public perception of encyclopedic has changed since the marriage of data storage with computation. A printed volume has limitations that do not exist in a database or a filesystem. A wiki encyclopedia can easily preserve all information ever added to it, and still present it through as many interfaces as it likes. If articles are tagged with enough metadata, it would not be extraordinarily difficult to produce all of the following automatically, with no further human intervention: abridged dictionary, unabridged dictionary, single-volume encyclopedia, multi-volume encyclopedia, single-disc encyclopedia, all math and science, all history, all art, all art minus the webcomics, all meaningful human knowledge, every last bit of trivia ever recorded, and everything written by anyone named Steven or Stephen. It could be like moderating an entire library with the Slashdot system and then setting the default browse level to +4 or +5. But instead, the moderator-tyrants delete anything that they believe to be (-1, unimportant), and they can't be effectively metamoderated by the community.
- triplesec 9y agoAnd this is the problem with putting online and adhering to C19th definitions of information optima. It's time for a new format and more adaptive information metaformat.