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."[1] Although Wikipedia appears to have solved that electronically,[2] 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.