User:Llywrch/Encyclopedias and Wikipedia

As Wikipedia concludes its tenth year as the free encyclopedia anyone can edit, I'd like to expound on a problem I believe has hampered how Wikipedia works, yet one no one has addressed: what is an encyclopedia, and how well does Wikipedia meet that definition?

These are two important questions which have escaped consideration because we think we know what an encyclopedia is. Wikipedia:Here to build an encyclopedia fails to make its point if we don't know how to tell the difference between "encyclopedia" &, say, a collection of essays. We might call a book "encyclopedic" because it is abundantly packed with information on its subject. So far, so good. Then there are the situations where Wikipedians complain that material does not belong in Wikipedia because it is "not encyclopedic"; does that mean the article is not packed with enough information? Maybe these speakers can explain what they mean by that word, at least to some extent; or maybe they cannot. If we turn to one collection of definitions of encyclopedia, the physical qualities of an encyclopedia (alphabetical order, multiple volumes) is as prevalent as the conceptual qualities (a reference work, covers numerous topics). I believe we don't know, in clear & shared terms, what an encyclopedia is. If this is true, then anyone who condemns content for not being "encyclopedic" is making an argument logically indistinguishable from Wikipedia:I just don't like it.

Even more troubling, I suspect we also don't know what an encyclopedia is used for. Don't take my word for it; an undisputed expert in the field has said as much. Robert McHenry, onetime editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "the dirty little secret of the encyclopedia industry is that we don't know whether or not people read what we publish." Although Wikipedia appears to have solved that electronically, whether any of it is read remains a mystery. My own anecdotal knowledge of how people use encyclopedias have been for entertainment (as a child I would read articles or follow the cross-links in articles), or to plagiarize for term papers (as I've been told; silly me, I never thought of doing that), or to learn chess from (which is how a cousin told me she learned the game).

I have this belief, a probably naive belief, that encyclopedias should be used for more serious purposes than these. And I admit that I have wondered about the definition of this word, this idea, for a pragmatic reason: I believe that if all of the policies of Wikipedia were redefined on a rational basis -- think of Euclid's Elements or Russell's & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica -- a large proportion of the conflicts involving policy could be avoided. While I admit Kurt Gödel has demonstrated clearly there are limits to this approach, I still believe this approach would solve more problems than our current patchwork of policies created haphazardly over the years. However, there has been surprisingly little study on the genre of an encyclopedia, so even if we had a consensus on what an encyclopedia was, the ensuing logical reasoning may force us to embrace new rules we do not agree with.

Some Wikipedia attempts

Let us begin by looking at What is an encyclopedia, an attempt by Larry Sanger to understand just what it is that Nupedia— and its offspring Wikipedia— are trying to be. Written during the formative period of our project, it is the only essay written by a Wikipedian to specifically address this topic. I found it a disappointing essay.

Sanger begins well enough, telling us what he intends to discuss.

Some recent events on Wikipedia have raised a question that has been idly bothering me for well over a year now: what is an encyclopedia, anyway? I'm not so much interested in historical definitions; I'm interested in a sort of prescriptive, revisionist definition that Nupedia and Wikipedia can actually use (after some debate, perhaps) in conceiving of their projects.

While I have no problem with rejecting "historical definitions", I don't know what he means by "a sort of prescriptive, revisionist definition"; the phrase "a sort of" is one of those fluffy words which sets off a warning bell in my head. I also have no problem with the definition being "prescriptive" -- the whole idea of defining this term is to then use it as a measuring stick not only to measure our progress towards the ideal, but to whack people on the hand who are hindering our progress to it. However, how can a definition be "revisionist" if we ignore "historical definitions"? We have nothing to revise.

"First, what sort of knowledge is included in an encyclopedia?" he asks, without ever proceeding to his second point; that is another warning bell. Sanger then gets stuck for nine paragraphs on the epistemology of this encyclopedia, & never offers a general definition of an encyclopedia. He does pose, in passing, some thoughts pertaining to a more general definition as he attempts to conclude his epistemological reflections: "There is one important result, however, of the fact that general encyclopedias codify "human knowledge": it is that it is appropriate that general encyclopedias be written from a neutral point of view." Here he assumes, without the depth of thought he invested on the importance of "neutral point of view", that "general encyclopedias codify 'human knowledge'", a belief he returns to at the beginning of the next paragraph,

Getting back to the main task at hand, I would say that encyclopedias codify adequately important synthetic "human knowledge," both declarative and procedural. Let us call this encyclopedic knowledge for short. Encyclopedic knowledge is the sort of knowledge that we ought to find in general encyclopedias.

Sanger's ignoring the issue how the encyclopedia can be considered as a genre was the subject of several responses to this essay, written by Mark Christensen, MichaelTinkler, & Lee Daniel Crocker. Sanger dismissed their objections as issues of "pedagogy" or what he labelled "human knowledge", irrelevant to his obsession on the nature of the information that made up Wikipedia's content. I am not surprised that his essay has become irrelevant to the countless discussions on Wikipedia. It is a fossil whose only importance is to students of the origins of Wikipedia's policy on neutral point of view.

A far more familiar attempt to define the encyclopedia is the essay Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. It is not a perfect match to what we are looking for here, because a section of this essay is concerned about the Wikipedia community. But this combination is unavoidable, since Wikipedia & its community are intertwined like bone & tissue: one provides a rigid structure, the other provides protection & support, & if separated both will die.

The relevant part of this essay is essentially a list of things Wikipedia is not: it is not a dictionary, a soapbox, a manual, an indiscriminate collection of information, etc. This helps a little, but only if we have a working idea of what an encyclopedia is. Otherwise, all of these negative statements merely eliminate a number of possibilities we may not have seriously contemplated. Negative definitions only work if direct knowledge is not possible, as in negative theology; & a mystical approach to the encyclopedia will not work to elucidate the genre in a useful way.

Other attempts

Now let's turn to a published encyclopedia's mission statement. For this exercise, I selected the New Columbia Encyclopedia simply because I own a copy. Its preface sets forth several principles that embody the philosophy behind its creation: the opening three paragraphs I will quote at length for us to study. The first reads:

Compact and ready for instant reference, the encyclopedia offers authentic and accurate information in a condensed form. Cross-references enable the reader to locate an article quickly, and bibliographies at the end of many articles provide guides to additional reading matter. Since the development of specialization, no encyclopedia can succeed in presenting the sum of human knowledge. Nevertheless, the editors of the New Columbia Encyclopedia have provided the reader with a wide-ranging variety of subjects that fall within the province of a general reference work.

Compactness aside, for electronic formats beat paper hands down, the careful reader will note certain crucial ideas presented in this paragraph, which include "authentic and accurate information" (a declared intent to be accurate), the use of "cross-references" to make information easier to access, the use of bibliographies to imply that this encyclopedia is a stepping stone towards further knowledge of topics, and the reluctant admission that this work does not cover all human knowledge.

The next paragraph quotes twice from its founding editor, Clarke Fisher Ansley. The first quotation reads:

One who makes good use of the art of reading needs to have three reference works at hand: a dictionary, an atlas, and an encyclopedia. The dictionary and the atlas for workaday purposes are each in one volume. ... The Columbia Encyclopedia has been compiled to serve readers of English in a like way, as the companion of the dictionary and the atlas.

Here Ansley introduces the concept of the encyclopedia as a reference work. He expresses here the issue that an encyclopedia is not complete, that for issues of usability the articles must be shorter than a comprehensive discussion of their subjects. This idea, with an important qualification, is the subject of the second quotation from Ansley: "The most that others may have in a specialist's field is first aid; and in the specialties of others, the specialist's need is not less than that of other men."

The third and last paragraph shows that the ideas of neutral point of view and no original research are not inventions of Wikipedia. I only wish that the third guiding principal here was also reflected in Wikipedia policy.

With these principles in mind, the editors reviewed authoritative sources and summarized generally accepted judgments not individual interpretations. Insofar as possible, the first edition was a survey of prevailing views, written in language that was clear and intelligible to the general reader.

One could argue that it is Wikipedia's strength that we have never spent countless hours considering this larger picture. Instead of arguing how our users would be better served if we wrote about our subjects in 1000, or in 500, or in even fewer words, early volunteers simply wrote about subjects the best they could, hoped for the best, and as a result Wikipedia became one of the top 10 websites on the Internet. We defined what an encyclopedia is by writing one. That would be a comforting conclusion if we were certain that we had experienced or knew of a successful encyclopedia. But as McHenry's words cited above shows, we can't be certain that we have. Elsewhere I reviewed a devastating criticism of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which shows its value to the user was not for its content, but as a symbol of the owner's status and culture. And although Einbinder's attention & criticism was on this work, his comments in passing show that he was not more favorably disposed to its competitors.

So let me return to the results of our close reading of the preface of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. From this text, as well as others I have mentioned, we have collected several concepts vital in the creation of an encyclopedia. These concepts include:

• An encyclopedia is a reference work.
• It provides extensive coverage of numerous topics of knowledge; a general encyclopedia is expected to cover all known topics, while a specialized encyclopedia covers only the topics of that specialty.
• It may provide all of the details of a topic, or only a selection. (By "selection", one could also say "the background on" or "an overview of"; judgment is used to make this selection.)
• Its contents are in a systematic order. It has a structure that facilitates its use.

Earlier writers & editors of encyclopedias wrestled with the same concepts -- my apologies to Sanger, who didn't want to be burdened by history -- as Richard Yeo shows in his fascinating book Encyclopedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture. Take one of these, how deeply should an article discuss its subject: should an article attempt to be a monograph on its subject, or be a succinct introduction, touching on the important points & providing a useful bibliography to help the reader on her or his further research? Jimmy Wales' off-cited statement that Wikipedia will "contain the whole of human knowledge" is only a distraction from this important consideration; a well-written essay of 1000 words might be far more useful than twenty or thirty times as much text. This is also an issue Yeo touches on in his work I mention above: Chamber's Cyclopedia was composed of short entries, most of which were cross-references (not all of which led to other articles), as was the case with many successful encyclopedias of his time; the Britannica changed the genre with its emphasis on longer articles which provided a survey of the subject. This is where Sanger's obsession with the nature of the knowledge in Wikipedia distracted him from the central issue -- the best way to organize & present its content. And although the effective result has been to prefer short articles on specific persons, places or things, we cannot be certain this is the best result. Neither we nor our audience know a proper model to compare our work to.

Looking forward

And there are many other issues about how to best present the undeniably fabulous treasure of knowledge & learning we have accumulated. These include:

• How do we make our articles as easy to update & keep up-to-date?
• Should the goal of our articles be to replace existing books, periodicals & websites on these topics?
• How do we best co-ordinate our articles, & make our content more accessible?
• Should hyperlinks (Wikipedia's form of cross-references) be used only to draw the reader further into the work, or should we adopt Diderot's vision where "readers, by exploring cross-references, might participate in an ongoing conversation"?
• Are the articles we worry about getting right the same ones our users depend on us getting right?

One would hope that the Wikimedia Foundation would fund research along these lines. From what I have been able to learn, the major encyclopedia publishers have been content to stick with the basic format -- articles in alphabetical order, cross-references to other articles, sometimes add a bibliography to the end of an article -- that has kept them flush with income for over a century. Instead of spending money on research & development, these publishers spent it on advertising & building up a sales network. Here is an long-ignored need that would benefit the largest community associated with Wikipedia: its millions of users. However, the Foundation has demonstrated a myopic choice by targeting money on improving the interface for writing articles -- the need of a community with less than one thousand active members. As if there were millions of people out there eager to write encyclopedia articles for free, a hobby that any Wikipedian will admit is peculiar & eccentric. Although I could say that readers still must navigate thru a mountain of text to find the information they need, the metaphor that best fits is not a "mountain" but an "ice burg". The actual answer a user is looking for may lie in the much larger accumulation of discussions & revisions only veteran Wikipedians know exist, yet even they lack the tools to properly search.

As I look at what has been accomplished with Wikipedia, I wonder whether we have, in fact, created a reference work that helps & empowers our users. To answer that question, however, one must explore virtual continents of tasks, & no one seems willing to admit these unknown lands might even exist. Some of them were not dreamed of by our older competitors. Answering this question is a need that grows ever more pressing. Many of us who contribute to Wikipedia see this online encyclopedia through our encounters with Britannica or World Book; however, it was only 1990 -- not much more than twenty years ago -- when the first encyclopedias on CD were sold; the number of encyclopedias available for people to see and use started to decline at that point. It won't be more than a few years until we begin to encounter people who have never held a hardback copy in their hands, who think of an encyclopedia as a website on the Internet. They will find how Wikipedia organizes its contents -- a structure taken from print encyclopedias they have never seen -- confusing & annoying. This may induce them to leave Wikipedia for a new, more intuitive vision of the encyclopedia.

I can only hope this essay encourages volunteers, most of whom are as poor in resources as I, to make their own explorations so we might know how to create an encyclopedia that not only educates but empowers our readers.