Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia is not a dictionary/Archive 1

This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

→

Archive 5

Support/opposition

Latest comment: 16 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

User guide "Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not" claims that "Wikipedia is not a slang and idiom guide". But perhaps it should be.

Wikipedians who support "Wikipedia is not a slang and idiom guide" include:

mav
Angela
User:Robert Merkel
Jiang
tompagenet
Martin (not a slang guide, but articles like slang are still cool)
Theodore Kloba: Individual slang word entries should not have their own Wikipedia articles, but a collection of slang words from the same slang can make a good article. E.g.: Internet slang

Wikipedians who oppose "Wikipedia is not a slang and idiom guide" include:

BL
Smerdis of Tlön 12:47, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)
TOTB
ZyMOS (talk), this section should change from Wikipedia is not a slang and idiom guide, to Wikipedia is not a dictionary, as is the policy/article. —Preceding comment was added at 05:37, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
rsreston - it's better to have a short dictionary definition than nothing at all. —Preceding comment was added at 18:53, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Discussion

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I agree in principle. I don't want to see Wikipedia cluttered with word definitions. But this has already become a gray area when you substitute "glossary" for "dictionary." Take, for example, American football/Glossary. There's a Wikipedia article for forward pass? C'mon!

I got interested in this issue in response to Larry's comment about my induhvidual page. I thought it was a phenomenon interesting enough to warrant an article, although I only wrote a stub. Larry referred me to item #3 of what Wikipedia is not.

I'm not entirely convinced about the inappropriateness of induhvidual, yet.

<>< tbc

It certainly has a place in a larger article about Scott Adams and Dilbert. I don't think the term is used or understood outside of that context enough to merit coverage on its own. --LDC

I agree with the title. It is not a dictionary, glossary, thesarus, or any other reference source. First and foremost, the Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Second, it is a place for academic debate as it relates to the content of the Wikipedia. That is it. If you want a free personal web page go to geocities or angelfire.

The Black Griffen

I oppose, at least, the stricture that "Wikipedia is not a usage guide." Almost all of the grammatical particles of English have interesting histories. Their usage, moreover, is highly idiomatic and requires a fairly extensive discussion to even approach a description. These explanations go well beyond dictionary definitions. The English Wikipedia seems to have a fair number of contributors for whom English is not a native language. Adding usage and idiom explanations has no other place. Smerdis of Tlön 12:47, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The core issue is the perception of Wikipedia, right? Not a matter of resources. So, how about a global Glossary page with intentionally brief subpages for those terms that don't rate a main entry but may require some explanation? That would avoid having to repeatedly enter a parenthetical explanation on every page that uses a term, and its appearance underneath Glossary would make it clear, I think, that it's not a serious entry. The extra effort to enter [[Glossary/Foo]] instead of [[Foo]] isn't too terrible a compromise. This is just off the top of my head, so I'll leave it to others to poke holes in it. --loh

Actually, that (or some variation of it) is a great idea, and I'm embarrased that I didn't think of it already. It will involve changing Wikipedians' habits and culture a bit, but I think it would be worth the effort. --LDC

It looks like I'm going to have to engage in a little more equine abuse. Wikipedia isn't a dictionary, it's an encyclopedia. Therefore, I think it's a waste of our time, qua time spent working on an encyclopedia, to work on writing a glossary, however presented. Glossary-type information is either to be found in suitable encyclopedia articles (about jargon, or in articles themselves), which is totally acceptable, or to be found at http://www.dictionary.com or your dictionary of choice.

Try this out for size: if you think the meaning of some word both (1) needs explanation and (2) doesn't merit more than a dictionary entry's worth of explanation, then you should probably just define the word in the article itself. On the other hand, if the term really does need some special explanation that you can refer to from several different other articles, such as cannot be found in a standard fat dictionary, then probably your term is a piece of jargon. Explaining jargon is totally acceptable in an encyclopedia. The explanation of jargon is an art, by the way. It's not just a matter of giving a dictionary-type definition. It's a matter of conveying how the word is used, in what contexts, and it almost always helps to give some background information about related topics. And, of course, much jargon does itself name important topics, about which a lot of non-semantic information is very important to include in an encyclopedia. Hence, most complete, good explanations of jargon will not look like dictionary definitions.

If the above is correct, then we still won't, in the end, have many articles that look like dictionary definitions. The briefest of definitions can be included in other articles. When they need to be referred to by many other articles, they're probably jargon, and jargon almost always can be usefully and helpfully explained with information that involves more than just the sort of basic semantic information you'd find in a dictionary.

The above-mentioned football terms are, indeed, football jargon, without which it is impossible to understand or explain the game. That's why it's OK to have that jargon. I have my doubts that induhvidual is a piece of jargon necessary to explain anything that belongs in an encyclopedia, although someone far more expert on Scott Adams and Dilbert might want to disagree with me, I guess. :-)

I hammer on this point, that we're working on an encyclopedia, for what I think is a good reason. Part of what makes Wikipedia so cool is that we are focusing on the fact that it's an encyclopedia and not, in addition, a bunch of everything2 nodes (just for example). If we let it, it would become all that, and more. But then it wouldn't be half as cool as it is. There's a reason we're here and not at h2g2, everything2, Usenet, Kuro5hin, Project Gutenburg, etc. --LMS

I understand. I decided to give the text a home at http://prosaic.swiki.net/13. So. The FAQ explains how to delete a page, and I did delete the text. But it didn't go away altogether. The FAQ doesn't say how to do that, so I'll leave it to someone more knowledgeable. <>< tbc

Why all the debate? Compare any sensible sized dictionary to any sensible sized encyclopedia. The amount of material in the encyclopedia will swamp the material in the dictionary. When it reaches a sensible size, you could add a whole dictionary to wikipedia and noone would even notice. --drj

A good dictionary has much less information in many more entries than a good encyclopedia. This means that if you put a dictionary and an encyclopedia together, the majority of entries will come from the dictionary, but the majority of the information will come from the encyclopedia. This makes it hard to find information; most links and most search results will lead to dictionary definitions. -- Kragen

Very well stated, Kragen. --LMS

I think there's a non sequitur: Does a high number of entries really cause a high number of links? I think, this number is entirely up to us, the authors. Realistically, nobody would write an article like this. Any sensible author would only wikify words which he/she feels deserve a wikipedia article. Let's trust the collective intelligence of Wikipedia! Sebastian 08:50 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

BTW, as I'm revisiting this, I noticed that of the above words only an currently has an article. With an interesting bit of information. Sebastian 20:07 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

Actually, the "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" philosophy is, as of September 2001, being used as a justification to delete stub entries.

I haven't seen this happening, but that's not to say that it isn't. Any examples? -- Stephen Gilbert

See Quimby, Quagmire, Quintuplet, Quadruplet, Quiver

The question was asked two months ago, when the comment was made. Any examples from then? --Stephen Gilbert

I hope you can understand that it would be difficult for me to find examples now. I apologize for not doing so at the time. --TheCunctator

The fact that the Wikipedia-is-not-a-dictionary policy is sometimes used to delete article stubs, when the stub could actually be the stub of a legitimate encyclopedia article, does not make the policy wrong. It makes the policy wrongly applied.

There is absolutely nothing wrong, in my opinion, with deleting stubs that will never be anything more than dictionary definitions. But whether a stub could ever be "anything more than dictionary definition" is somewhat difficult to determine. I can easily imagine a long, informative article on arrow quivers; I cannot easily imagine anything more than a dictionary definition of "quiver" in the sense of what I do when approaching a grizzly bear. Hence, my tendency would be to leave a stub expressing the former sense, and delete a stub expressing the latter sense. See [1] for further considerations from me on this. --LMS

Heh, actually, I could see a good article on the psychological/physiological reasons and causes of trembling and quivering whilst under extreme stress. Basically, my opinion is that almost everything makes a good article. --Anders Törlind

Re the article topic you mention, sure! But then we'd want to make sure that the topic was correctly named. Do psychologists who study the stuff call it "trembling"? --LMS

Aye, correct naming is another matter entirely, but for the sake of argument, let's say that psychologists do not call it quivering. In that case the stub should certainly be moved and a redirect implemented. Deleting still seems a bit harsh IMHO. --Anders Törlind

But what if the stub has absolutely no useful information either about the word that psychologists use or about the psychological phenomenon? I.e., what if, as is sometimes the case, the definition is just a definition of the word and has value only as such? Then deleting is perfectly fine. --LMS

Cor blimey! An argument of almost infinite regress looms... :-) sjc

So, if you don't like WINAD, the name of the game is, write articles that look like they could become encyclopedia articles. If you want to counter a deletion, pick up the page and do just that. (The dictstub may help with that, I think. Fortunately one can't kill earlier versions...)

Yes! I agree 100% with the latter! --LMS

24 - there is plenty of use for disambiguators if the term has become in some way significant or if it is widely confused. The criteria for an entry may be different than in a dictionary, i.e. not all senses need be covered for all words, but when a dictionary-type entry is required to avoid confusion in the world at large, or even between entries, go for it.

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. --User: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. :-) --User: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 drunkenness, 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 (you mean "What is the cost of a dictionary-like entry?"? Sebastian 21:50 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)), 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.

--User:Larry Sanger

Your Second point above is good. I now see why you don't simply merge the two. There certainly is a difference in focus.

But so is Lee's point: The distinction between "dictionary" and "encyclopedia" was historically imposed by the limitations of paper.

Let me try to reconcile the two points. Lee's historic point in and of itself doesn't mean that we should discard the distinction. It may still be a useful paradigm if it helps us stay focussed. However, we should use it smartly. Segragating all information into two distinct domains just doesn't strike me as a very smart idea. Let's think about other ways to achieve this. Such as:

Add two checkboxes so authors can tag articles that clearly fall in one or the other class.

Larry, you proposed the tenet "our sole purpose is to build an encyclopedia [and forbid all dictionary-type entries]".

With all due respect for your vision, to which we owe wikipedia, I don't think that everyone who volunteers to add valid contributions to wikipedia would want to, or should be forced to, endorse such a restriction. I, for one, would endorse a tenet like

"our sole purpose is to collect the best free and unbiased encyclopedic information on the web"

If we, on our hunt for mushrooms, find a few blueberries as well, we should not disdain them.

I don't share Larry's concern that one would be at the expense of the other. The internet is such a huge resource of intelligent people - tapping it is like drinking from a lake. There certainly are plenty of people out there who find writing entries on words of a natural language more interesting than writing elaborate articles. I don't think this has to harm the quality of the latter. A smooth transition may even dras these people towards what they can do best, and thus best serve the purpose to build an encyclopedia.

Sebastian 22:44 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

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?

Good point. Who wrote this? Sebastian 21:50 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

Please see this partial response. See also Wikipedia is not a dictionary and Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not.

Whoops, the link to wiktionary:Main Page in the article is busted. -- Merphant 11:47 Dec 12, 2002 (UTC)

I'd like to add some boilerplate text to this page for use when linking to wiktionary or when deliberately avoiding giving a definition (see definition and transvestite for examples). Something like:

''[[Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary|Wikipedia is not a dictionary]]. For a dictionary definition, see [http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Definition Wiktionary:Definition]''

but this is a protected page. Can someone unprotect it? (assuming that this isn't a dumb idea) Martin

Now unprotected. --Brion

I'm a newbie. I've read this page about 7 times, and I'm still no closer to knowing what should and shouldn't go into Wikipedia. Sure, it's an encylopedia not a dictionary -- so how about a simple explanation of the difference? I'm not an editor, biographer, librarian, or even bibliophile, and in general I don't read dictionaries or encyclopedias for fun. I just want to write content that belongs and not get flamed. When does something stop being a word and start being a thing? All this debating minor points seems like a waste of time if you aren't getting the main message across to new contributors.

As an example, see Hentai. Is this a dictionary entry or not? Someone in the talk page seemed pretty sure it didn't belong. Why?

-- mib 04:40 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

A dictionary entry will describe the meaning of a word and perhaps its pronunciation and its origin. An encyclopaedia entry should describe not only these things (in the case of words) but go further and discuss significance, history, effects, related concepts and so on. There is much more meat in an encyclopaedia article than in a dictionary article. -- Derek Ross 04:52 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

For your Hentai example, I would say that the first paragraph is a dictionary type entry. If that was all there was then Hentai should be deleted. However the addition of the next paragraph turns the whole thing into an encyclopaedia article. The objection was probably raised because the subject of article is so narrow that it only just about makes it as an encyclopaedic subject. It would be better if this was part of an anime article or part of an article on Japanese sexual mores. -- Derek Ross 04:59 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

That's fairly helpful, thank you. Can someone put that (or something equally clear) prominently on the Wikipedia is not a dictionary page? What about the biographical case, what distinguishes a biographical dictionary entry from an encyclopedia entry (as presumably a biopgrahical entry would include history, significance, etc.). Is Fujishima Kosuke appropriate for Wikipedia?

(Actually I have a lot of questions about foreign language content in general, is there a good place for discussion, or some existing guidelines?)

Thanks in advance, mib 05:01 May 3, 2003 (UTC).

Talk about grey areas! Okay, I'll do my best. A biographical dictionary entry would just say who a person was, perhaps by giving information about what they were most famous for. For instance

Robert Burns - Scots poet who wrote 'Auld Lang Syne'

whereas an encyclopedia article on Robert Burns should go into depth about the man, his life, his poetry, the environment that he lived in, etc. I would say that the Fujishima Kosuke is currently a biographical dictionary entry and wouldn't be out of place in something like Who's Who. However Wikipedia biographical entries tend to improve over time as people keep adding to them, so the F. K. article will probably cross the line into encyclopedia territory if enough people are actually interested in him and therefor I wouldn't be quite so quick to crticise a short biographical entry as I would be to criticise a simple word definition. -- Derek Ross 05:22 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

'Moved from User talk:81.203.98.109:

We don't usually link to Wiktionary definitions, like you just did in Viscosity. If you think it's important enough, you can define the word in the article, otherwise just don't bother. -- Tim Starling 11:56, Aug 2, 2003 (UTC) Viktionary it´s a help internal tool (wikimedia tool, like wikipedia) to spare wikipedia space. Why repeat something that has definition in wikipedia, if not necessary ??. The user can easily see the definition in wikitionary.

I think it is so Wikipedia can stand alone, without people needing to move between it and Wiktionary. Why not get an acount and login? Angela 13:35, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

There is problem when one wants to create an article with wiktionary definitions. You the person that said it to me. So, wiktionary it´s an internal usefull wikimedia/wikipedia tool. I meant that the entire article should not be a definition. If that is all there is to say about something, then it belongs only in Wiktionary. However, it's ok for a longer article to include a definition. Does that make sense? Angela 13:50, 2 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Too much information in the same wikipedia article (too much definitions) is noise. If somebody (i.e. foreign people; learning persons... want to know the signification of a basic - for some knowledge branch - word, can use wiktionary links from wikipedia). The colour of wikipedia links to wiktionary is different from the colour of wikipedia links to wikipedia.

I'm curious about this:

While on the one hand we are all certainly delighted that Wikipedia is growing in breadth, some (but not all) of us view breadth at the expense of the very notion of what we are working on--an encyclopedia--as a bad idea.

Could somebody who does hold this view explain why breadth is counter-productive to creating an encyclopaedia? --Camembert

I don't strongly hold this opinion, but suppose we decided to broaden wikipedia by allowing dictionary entries. Well, now most of our entries would be dictionary entries... but most of the content would be encyclopedia entries - so adding lots of small dictionary entries would make our best content harder to find.

The other argument is that if Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, people going to an article expect to get encyclopedia information. If we give them genealogical or gazeteer-like or otherwise non-encyclopedic information, then they'll be disappointed, and possibly frustrated.

I don't know whether I believe that myself, but I can empathise with the fear of those who do. Martin 21:03, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I think I may have misread the paragraph slightly. I was reading the bit that I quoted above as being closely related to the rest of the paragraph it's in (which is talking about obscure biographical articles), which led me to think it was trying to say that having articles on too-obscure figures is counter-productive and makes us less of an encyclopaedia. But now I look at it again, I think it's actually meant to be about not including reams of genealogical data, as you say. It doesn't seem very clear to me though (maybe when I've slept on it...).

By the way, I don't agree with "adding lots of small dictionary entries would make our best content harder to find" - I don't want us to have dictionary entries, but if we did, I don't see how having articles on if, push and might would make it harder to find info on surreal numbers (this is rather tangental, however - I'm rambling. Feel free to ignore it). --Camembert

There is no definite line between an encyclopaedia and a dictionary. There are to many words that have so many interesting facts around them that I think excluding "dictionary entries" is excluding alot of valid, encyclopaediac information. BL 04:19, 31 Aug 2003 (UTC)

One further reason why I feel this policy is misguided and needs to be suspended pending serious reconsideration is that it seems to have metastasized, from the notion that articles consisting merely of dictionary definitions should be deleted, to the notion that an article merits deleted if it is about "only a word," no matter how beyond the dictionary an article about the word becomes. This puts a whole raft of topics in linguistics and logic beyond the pale. Smerdis of Tlön 19:02, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It seems to me that part of the problem is once you send someone off to wiktionary or wikiglosory or wikibiodictionary, the navigation gets becomes a problem. I have seen this problem in other wikis that naturally want to include content that is better covered in wikipedia. It seem like we need to be able to include a page from another wikimedia based project -- pull it in and report the license info of where we got it, but keep it in this wiki's name space and navigation. Then if there are links within the page that exist in our name space we could use them, and if the others we could treat as external links. It would also need some way to provide a custom introduction, and possibly conclusion that could be edited, but the imported content would be verbatim. -- Jake 16:53, 14 October 2005 (UTC)