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# Encyclopedia and or versus dictionary

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Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. The only reason, as far as I can tell, for enumerating various senses that a word can have is to direct people to appropriate articles; I don't see how Wikipedia has an interest qua encyclopedia in enumerating senses of a word in the way that a dictionary does. I'm certainly open to debate on this point; perhaps I'm not seeing things quite right. --LMS

What is the cost of a dictionary-like entry? Is Wikipedia worse off for having them? -TS

One cost is that I think that short dictionary-like entries "scratch an itch" prematurely. That is, having no page will provoke someone to write one. Having a too-short page, with just a definition, will not provoke someone to write more. This is just a theory, which I offer without empirical evidence of any kind. :-) --Jimbo Wales

For wiki to be most useful, a dictionary like stub article giving a short definition of a topic should be at the top of longer articles. New topics may initially manifest as dictionary sized entries and eventually grow into full articles.

For drunkeness?, one could expand on the medical stages of how alcohol affects the body and medical/behavioral treatment for chronic alcholism.

The distinction between "dictionary" and "encyclopedia" is imposed by the limitations of paper. There is no reason we should obey such an arbitrary distinction when it is not useful. Wikipedia is "A place to look up things you may have read but don't understand." Certainly we want descriptive text in much greater detail than a dictionary because we don't suffer the size limitations, but there's no reason at all not to have the dictionary-like information as well, and in fact I think we should have more of it, and a standard way for presenting it. --LDC

Tim asks a good question, but I think he might have asked it thinking it was rhetorical. But it has a good answer. While I don't know if Wikipedia is worse off for having dictionary-like entries, in general, the cost of having many dictionary-like entries--which list several senses of a word or phrase and give no further information than the meaning of the word or phrase--is to give the impression that Wikipedia has no ambitions to being any more than a dictionary. This makes Wikipedia seem to be much more boring than it could be; dictionaries are interesting but not half as interesting as an infinitely-expandable encyclopedia. When new people stumble across Wikipedia and see that some significant percentage of entries are just definitions, they could easily form the misleading and damaging impression that we're building just a dictionary. So I think writing article stubs that are no more than definitions is a bad habit to get into.

As I've said before myself (see Wikipedia commentary/Breadth and depth), I think there's nothing wrong with "stub" articles per se, and in fact I think it's great to have them. I just wish that when you make them, they wouldn't consist just of lists of definitions of senses of the title word or phrase.

Lee also makes a good point, that we, ourselves, needn't distinguish between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. But there are two points to bear in mind. First, while we might not make this distinction, most other people do--and when people see lots of mere definitions, listing multiple senses, some of which have little to do with any obvious encyclopedia topic, then our readers might conclude (reasonably) that we are doing what they would describe as writing a dictionary. I think this would be a bad thing.

Second, there is a useful distinction to be made between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. They simply don't overlap entirely, nor should they, because they have different purposes. The purpose of a dictionary is to give the meanings of words and short, common phrases; the purpose of an encyclopedia is to impart knowledge. Dictionaries help us to understand language; encyclopedias go far beyond that. Fine, you say, but surely the meanings of words is one of the things at least required for knowledge--and with this I agree. But if the focus of a project is on giving the meanings of words, then one focuses on stating multiple senses of words, including senses about which there is little specialized knowledge beyond what can be imparted by the definition. This, as I said, creates the practical problem of making it seem that what the project is about is (limited to) giving definitions of words. Even when we know that that's not what it's about, if we get into the habit of just enumerating senses of a word, without adding any further information (information not entailed by the typical dictionary definition(s) of the word), then de facto we are treating Wikipedia as a dictionary. I think there's something wrong with that. We could be doing and encouraging so much more than that.

Why doesn't someone make http://www.wiktionary.com to make a wiki-based dictionary? That would be interesting, and it could be useful, too.

But why not just combine a dictionary and encyclopedia, so that we could use the one for the other? The trouble with this proposal is just that encyclopedias provide more information than is typically needed when one consults a dictionary. It would be silly to come to Wikipedia if all you wanted to know is the meaning of the word--and usually, when we (as some of us often do) consult a dictionary, that is all we want to know.

So I think we should say that our sole purpose is to build an encyclopedia, and our habits should be consistent with this purpose. Of course, one important habit to get into (that most of us already are in) is to define the sense of the word we use at the beginning of an encyclopedia article. But that doesn't mean that our purpose is to create a dictionary.

So, I disagree with Lee when he says we should present information first in dictionary-type format. I think we should let people consult dictionaries when they want definitions, and we on Wikipedia should focus not on perfecting our lexicography but on increasing and imparting our (a posteriori) knowledge. I do think that we "perfect our lexicography" at the overall expense of our central purpose, of building an encyclopedia.

--Larry Sanger

A fundamental restriction on encyclopedias is a lack of space for short entries. Is a 40 word biography of someone a biographical dictionary article or an encyclopedia article?

Wiki should not suffer from a sprinkling of dictionary like stub entries. Eventually, many of them will bloom into full entries.

Maybe the correct tact is to enter the basic stub/dictionary entry and one or two questions which should eventually provoke a larger article.

Some stub articles will start out looking like dictionary definitions.

Many full encyclopedia articles will contain multiple words and phrases which are unfamiliar to the ordinary guy. In such a case, an explanation of the word (be it definition or whatever) should be linked to, independent of the main body of the text to that you don't ruin the flow of an article with continual interruptions to explain yourself, and yet don't make the reader leave wikipedia to find out what the hell you just said. Some of these word explanations may themselves grow to full articles in time. If they don't, it will be for only one reason: there is no call for such an article, and you would never find it in any other regular encyclopedia, either.

Trying to stop people from writing definitions serves no useful purpose. It is disingenous to imply that a project which contains some word definitions alongside thousands of fully developed encyclopedia articles will somehow be accidentally understood as being a dictionary.

Take this example from law: In writing about "nolo contendere," I wind up using the word 'allocute.' No one is going to get the sepcific legal meaning of that word in its two main senses, without prior education. So, I link to a new page to explain the word, generating a three-paragraph article. Guess what? I checked six on-line legal dictionaries, three English language dictionaries, and every encyclopedia I can access online, and the word was not defined or discussed in any of them. Two online thesaurus' had it. So, even if I were not able expand discussion of the word into a full article and had to leave it at just a definition, should I have left the word undefined?

Please see this partial response.

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Last edited June 12, 2001 5:45 am (diff)
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