Concise
Cornerstone/Keystone Articles
I propose that we create an alphabetical list of the "major" articles of the encyclopedia. Wikipedia already contains a list of "unusual articles," but doesn't contain an easily accessible list of "usual articles," the kind of articles that no encyclopedia can exist without, the kind of articles that other articles branch out of. I think that a list of "cornerstone articles" would be very helpful to people (like me) who like to read encyclopedias from cover to cover to understand the major concepts in the vast realm of human knowledge, but who don't want to sift through all of the minor (more specialized) ideas as they go about it. The ''Encyclopedia Brittanica'' people tried to get at this idea by dividing their encyclopedia into two sections: the "macropedia" and the "micropedia." I think that an online encyclopedia could do a much better job of listing selected "core" and "essential" articles in one place so that people who read encyclopedias for the "big," "important" articles could go about it much more efficiently. The only problem I can foresee with such an idea would be the debate over what exactly makes an article a "cornerstone / keystone" article. I suspect that the "discussion page" of such a list would be quite active, but the categorization scheme I have in mind should be pretty easily understood by most people: I am simply proposing a list of the major players in world history (From the A list, people like Nextel ringtones Aristotle and Abbey Diaz Alexander the Great), and the major ideas in science (Free ringtones asteroids), and the major animals of the world (Majo Mills aardvark) and the major cities or states of the world (Mosquito ringtone Alabama, Sabrina Martins Abu Dhabi), and so on. A good way to generate such a list would be to look at an existing short (or concise) encyclopedia and see what articles the editors thought that they couldn't live without. Children's encyclopedias are also very good places to find "shortenend" or "core" lists of "essential" encyclopedia articles.
The first ten entries of the '''A''' list of such a categorization scheme might look something like this:
'''A'''
*Nextel ringtones aardvark
*Abbey Diaz Aaron, Hank
*Free ringtones abacus
*Majo Mills Abolitionist movement
*Cingular Ringtones aborigine
*centuries martinique Abraham
*enquirer insists Abu Dhabi
*risk riotta Accra
*policy krugman acid Rain
*headline appeared Acropolis
And so on. Other letters would proceed in the same way and then a person who is interested in the "major topics" in human knowlege could just go down the list and (given world enough and time) read all of the "essential" articles without having to wade through an index that would insert (in the case of Wikipedia) several articles between each "Keystone" idea.
What do you think? Could this be done?experience seems N2lect2el/N2lect2el 16:45, 29 Nov 2004
:May have already been done. Check out assassinated ethel List of encyclopedia topics and the various subpages. caretaker at Bkonrad/older'''≠'''architecture horace User talk:Bkonrad/wiser 17:05, Nov 29, 2004
No. That's not at all what I'm looking for. Maybe it would be helpful if we thought about calling it "The Concise Wikipedia" or " Concise." The whole idea is that I don't want to have to wade through hundreds of articles about the various episodes of various TV shows to get to the "good stuff," which I consider to be the "cornerstone" ideas I discussed above. The subpages of the reversed childhood List of encyclopedia topics are nearly impossible to wade through in an efficient manner. I want to get away from the kinds of lists that I find throughout Wikipedia where I have to bypass hundreds of titles of every recording Motown put out as I scroll toward Mozart. I wouldn't mind seeing Mozambique between Motown and Mozart, but the endless minutiae has to go.patient this N2lect2el/N2lect2el 17:28, 29 Nov 2004
10,000 to 20,000 Articles
Most "concise encyclopedias" for sale on Amazon.com claim to have at least 15,000 articles. As it is now, Wikipedia has over 400,000 articles and while this is clearly good, it is also somewhat unmanagable and overwhelming to people who are trying to use the encyclopedia as part of a course of home schooling or self education or just general reading. I envision this page eventually listing the 10,000 or so "essential articles" of a small set of encyclopedias. I think this would be very useful because Wikipedia articles tend to be much better than the articles found in a small set of encyclopedias and much more detailed than anything that generally gets labled "concise"; hence, a "concise version" of Wikipedia could be very useful to someone practicing autodidacticism (Self Education). I know I spent many years before college just reading encyclopedias from cover to cover and I would like to see this become possible with Wikipedia.
So the question we have to ask ourselves before adding items to the list on the main page is: "Is the link I'm proposing connected to one of the core 10,000 articles no encyclopedia should be without?" "Is it an 'Essential' " (Here, I'm thinking of the ''Turner Classic Movies'' television series ''The Essentials'' where every week they play a movie that no one who wants to be a "film buff" should go without seeing; I think this is a good analogy for what I would like this page to become).she recovered N2lect2el/N2lect2el 23:15, 29 Nov 2004
Please also note that the 10,000 to 20,000 article idea is just a guess at the number of articles that should be listed here. Maybe, as this project develops, it will become clear that a concise version of Wikipedia is larger than most concise encyclopedias on the market. Since Wikipedia is bigger than any other encyclopedia in the same way that the Oxford English Dictionary is bigger than any other dictionary, and since the concise version of the OED is larger than many other full-length dictionaries, we might have to assume that the concise version of Wikipedia will be as big as some full-length 26 volume encyclopedias (many of which have around 50,000 entries1/8th Wikipedia's current content).
Please add links to the list to articles that you think are an essential part of a "concise encyclopedia" and we will worry about the exact number of them later.writes sensationalist N2lect2el/N2lect2el 23:21, 1 Dec 2004
Is ABBA essential?
Not yetmaybe not at all. Their self-titled first album and all the songs on it certainly wouldn't bebut is the group ABBA an essential? I don't know. I certainly have enjoyed their music from time to time and they were certainly influential, but I don't know if I'd call them "essential." At least not yet. This is the type of thing that I can see us eventually debating on this "discussion page." But I think that before we worry about questions like this, we should get the clearly "essential" entries on the list: things like a wrist disco and a puppy Sweden and an acacia The Battle of Waterloo and keep in mind the fact that even if different measurements ABBA does eventually make it on to the list, their second album bond flicks waterloo (album)/Waterloo never will. Please remember that the whole point of this page is to get away from "minutiae" and focus on the big picture, to make Wikipedia more accessible to the average reader, not less. There are plenty of places on Wikipedia to document every song ever recorded by our favorite bands, and while this is certainly a useful thing to do, I think there should also be some place on Wikipedia where we can get away from that if we want to and focus on the core ideas.
I hope this example is helpful.president jean N2lect2el/N2lect2el 00:41, 30 Nov 2004
Lincoln Library of Essential Information as Analog
Another analog for what I hope this concise version of the Wikipedia might become is the two volume set of books called ''The Lincoln Library of Essential Information''. This is basically a 2 volume, concise encyclopedia (which should be available at the library), but it presents itself as being a place to find everything you need to know to educate yourself as Lincoln did. Self-education is an important issue and I think that Wikipedia could be a very useful tool for those trying to educate themselves, as Lincold did, and as countless other people have done. But the problem with trying to educate yourself is that you don't know what information you need to learn. The publishers of the ''Lincoln Library'' understood this and put out a collection of what they thought was the most important stuff for people to know about (and they were quite eclectic too). I think that this could be easily done with a list of hyperlinks to existing Wikipedia articles.economists too N2lect2el/N2lect2el 14:44, 30 Nov 2004
Other articles similar to this one
Are you aware of Complete list of encyclopedia topics (obsolete) (particularly the history of that page) and Basic topics? I'm not sure whether you are duplicating some of the effort there.-Gadfium/gadfium 22:51, 30 Nov 2004
I wasn't aware of the Basic topics section, but I found it to be quite interesting and I (personally) will work my way through it because it looks like it would be fun to do sobut it isn't exactly what I would call a "concise encyclopedia" either. I'm looking for something that has the "feel" of a small set of encyclopedias, where the articles are arranged alphabetically and you can just read your way through and learn all kinds of fascinating stuff. As complex as Wikipedia is now, this is basically impossible to do. I think a list of essential encyclopedia articles would make it possible.
I also wasn't aware of the "complete list of topics" idea (and I'm not a technical person so I don't understand all of the complex problems that arose during the attempt to create such a list), but I don't think that what I am proposing here is the same thing. That seems to have been an attempt to build Wikipedia from the ground up. This is an attempt to list articles in Wikipedia as it exists today. The links in the list of links on the project page are not at all different from the links to existing articles that would occur within any article I could write on Wikipedia, so there shouldn't be anything technically wrong with writing a list that contains the words "Aristotle" and "Alexander the Great" and "asteroids" (and so on); otherwise, I wouldn't be able to create an article on (say) Famous Tutors in Western History and write a sentence that contains links to other articles (something like "Aristotle was Alexander the Great's tutor, but it is unclear whether or not he ever taught his pupil about asteroids.") That system seems to work OK; I don't see why this one shouldn't.N2lect2el/N2lect2el 16:06, 1 Dec 2004
Some suggestions
I think that this 'concise' idea is a good one. I also have fond memories of wandering from topic to topic in the encyclopedia.
I think that you can make some decisions rather quickly. Here is a (partial) list of what you might expect to find. Each item I list represents 100 or more articles:
* Do you want to add all of the UN member states?
** How about the chief executive of each state?
* You mentioned US states (Alabama) do you want provinces of Canada? What about China? (and by extension other countries).
* major rivers, mountains, islands, etc.
* Large cities which are not capitals of anything (like New York).
* all plants that are cultivated commercially.
* Sports stars (I see Hank Aaron).
** Do you want all of the 'Hall of Famer's?
** What about non-americans? Cricket? Football (European)?
* Nobel prize winners?
* What other people?
** Senators? All congress members?
** What about MPs from Great Britain, Canada?
** Cabinet ministers from all countries?
* Olympic sports,
** and recent medal winners
* Do you want any fictional characters? I noticed you have Saturn (Greek God)
** How about Oedipus
** Hamlet?
** Harry Potter?
My criteria would be that someone should be included if a politician would mention him in a speech and expect the audience to know what he's talking about.
My point in my list (above) is not that I think that any of those items absolutely must be included, but rather that the line is very gray, and the slope is very slippery, so the decisions must be rather arbitrary.
Mpearl/Morris 01:28, Dec 1, 2004
These are all great ideas Morris. I say, add them onto the list if you think they should go there. I certainly didn't intend for list I started to be exclusive to "American culture" or anything like thatI just think that we need a way to get away from the endless "minutiae" of Wikipedia as it exists today. Have you tried to navigate your way through any of the other existing article indexes on the category schemes page? It's nearly impossible to do.
But how do you decide what is "worthy" of being on a list of "essential" topics and what isn't? I'm not yet sure. But I don't think we should shy away from the task of trying to figure it out. If the Encyclopedia Brittanica people and the Columbia Encyclopedia people (etc.) can go through their encyclopedias and cull out the "essentials" so can we (and so should we). You're right, however, when you say that this process will be quite arbitrary. I worried before I proposed this idea that it was "against the spirit" of Wikipedia, which is by definition "open to every idea" (and I'm certainly in favor of that). I don't want to do anything that prevents people from writing articles about their favorite song if that is what they choose to do (I even like the fact that I can look up these articles if I need to know more about (say) The Beatles Hey Jude), but I also think there should be some way to bypass all of those minor articles if I want to and focus on the articles that are generally considered to be more "important." I know this notion smacks of elitism, but I've justified it to myself by deciding that I am in no way proposing that the "minor" or "less important" articles be eliminated or changed in any way. I think they should all still be part of Wikipedia and still add depth and detail to every article within Wikipediabut there should also be an index of the "major articles" of the encyclopedia that doesn't include the "minor articles." The publishers of all "concise encyclopedias" make these decisions. It's probably not a fun process, but somebody has to do it.
I like your idea that an aritcle should be included if it is something a politician could mention and expect her audience to understand. I think we should come up with some more criteria like that. One that motivates me is the simple comparison to the articles found in existing concise encyclopedias. If three out of four concise encyclopedias in the library contain an article on Cleopatra VII of Egypt/Cleopatra, chances are that Cleopatra is an important topic to include on our list.N2lect2el/N2lect2el 16:44, 1 Dec 2004
See also
m:List of articles all languages should have. Cyrius/Cyrius/User talk:Cyrius/✎ 00:18, 1 Dec 2004
Category
I'm going to put this in the "Editorial validation" category. There are some other things there you might be interested in. Maurreen/Maurreen 05:09, 2 Dec 2004
Fewer?
It might be good to start with smaller numbers. For example, collect the top 100 topics first. That's very doable, for one thing. Maurreen/Maurreen 05:35, 2 Dec 2004
: I think it will be good to create lists of 50 or 100 must-read articles for each major high-school-level subject (e.g. agriculture, art, astronomy, biography, biology, business, chemistry, cookery, computer science, culture, economics, geography, health, history, industry, law, literature, mathematics, music, philosophy, physics, politics, psychology, religion, sports). These lists may be helpful to homeschoolers. Toytoy/Toytoy 11:34, Dec 20, 2004
::I think that might be covered by various "Basic topics" lists. Maurreen/Maurreen 04:38, 21 Dec 2004
Identify categories
You'll make faster progress by identifying specific categories already defined
in Wikipedia, and then identifying specific articles if there's no category that fits.
You can reference a category without placing the page ''in'' the category by placing
a colon in front of the world "Category", like this: :Tag: African countries.
For example, I'd expect an encyclopedia to list all the current world countries;
and a U.S. encyclopedia would have an entry for each state.
Just identify the categories, and you're set.
The "country" category is too broad, but you can simply add this:
* African countries
* American countries
* Asian countries
* African countries
* American countries
* Asian countries
* African countries
* American countries
* Asian countries
I propose that we create an alphabetical list of the "major" articles of the encyclopedia. Wikipedia already contains a list of "unusual articles," but doesn't contain an easily accessible list of "usual articles," the kind of articles that no encyclopedia can exist without, the kind of articles that other articles branch out of. I think that a list of "cornerstone articles" would be very helpful to people (like me) who like to read encyclopedias from cover to cover to understand the major concepts in the vast realm of human knowledge, but who don't want to sift through all of the minor (more specialized) ideas as they go about it. The ''Encyclopedia Brittanica'' people tried to get at this idea by dividing their encyclopedia into two sections: the "macropedia" and the "micropedia." I think that an online encyclopedia could do a much better job of listing selected "core" and "essential" articles in one place so that people who read encyclopedias for the "big," "important" articles could go about it much more efficiently. The only problem I can foresee with such an idea would be the debate over what exactly makes an article a "cornerstone / keystone" article. I suspect that the "discussion page" of such a list would be quite active, but the categorization scheme I have in mind should be pretty easily understood by most people: I am simply proposing a list of the major players in world history (From the A list, people like Nextel ringtones Aristotle and Abbey Diaz Alexander the Great), and the major ideas in science (Free ringtones asteroids), and the major animals of the world (Majo Mills aardvark) and the major cities or states of the world (Mosquito ringtone Alabama, Sabrina Martins Abu Dhabi), and so on. A good way to generate such a list would be to look at an existing short (or concise) encyclopedia and see what articles the editors thought that they couldn't live without. Children's encyclopedias are also very good places to find "shortenend" or "core" lists of "essential" encyclopedia articles.
The first ten entries of the '''A''' list of such a categorization scheme might look something like this:
'''A'''
*Nextel ringtones aardvark
*Abbey Diaz Aaron, Hank
*Free ringtones abacus
*Majo Mills Abolitionist movement
*Cingular Ringtones aborigine
*centuries martinique Abraham
*enquirer insists Abu Dhabi
*risk riotta Accra
*policy krugman acid Rain
*headline appeared Acropolis
And so on. Other letters would proceed in the same way and then a person who is interested in the "major topics" in human knowlege could just go down the list and (given world enough and time) read all of the "essential" articles without having to wade through an index that would insert (in the case of Wikipedia) several articles between each "Keystone" idea.
What do you think? Could this be done?experience seems N2lect2el/N2lect2el 16:45, 29 Nov 2004
:May have already been done. Check out assassinated ethel List of encyclopedia topics and the various subpages. caretaker at Bkonrad/older'''≠'''architecture horace User talk:Bkonrad/wiser 17:05, Nov 29, 2004
No. That's not at all what I'm looking for. Maybe it would be helpful if we thought about calling it "The Concise Wikipedia" or " Concise." The whole idea is that I don't want to have to wade through hundreds of articles about the various episodes of various TV shows to get to the "good stuff," which I consider to be the "cornerstone" ideas I discussed above. The subpages of the reversed childhood List of encyclopedia topics are nearly impossible to wade through in an efficient manner. I want to get away from the kinds of lists that I find throughout Wikipedia where I have to bypass hundreds of titles of every recording Motown put out as I scroll toward Mozart. I wouldn't mind seeing Mozambique between Motown and Mozart, but the endless minutiae has to go.patient this N2lect2el/N2lect2el 17:28, 29 Nov 2004
10,000 to 20,000 Articles
Most "concise encyclopedias" for sale on Amazon.com claim to have at least 15,000 articles. As it is now, Wikipedia has over 400,000 articles and while this is clearly good, it is also somewhat unmanagable and overwhelming to people who are trying to use the encyclopedia as part of a course of home schooling or self education or just general reading. I envision this page eventually listing the 10,000 or so "essential articles" of a small set of encyclopedias. I think this would be very useful because Wikipedia articles tend to be much better than the articles found in a small set of encyclopedias and much more detailed than anything that generally gets labled "concise"; hence, a "concise version" of Wikipedia could be very useful to someone practicing autodidacticism (Self Education). I know I spent many years before college just reading encyclopedias from cover to cover and I would like to see this become possible with Wikipedia.
So the question we have to ask ourselves before adding items to the list on the main page is: "Is the link I'm proposing connected to one of the core 10,000 articles no encyclopedia should be without?" "Is it an 'Essential' " (Here, I'm thinking of the ''Turner Classic Movies'' television series ''The Essentials'' where every week they play a movie that no one who wants to be a "film buff" should go without seeing; I think this is a good analogy for what I would like this page to become).she recovered N2lect2el/N2lect2el 23:15, 29 Nov 2004
Please also note that the 10,000 to 20,000 article idea is just a guess at the number of articles that should be listed here. Maybe, as this project develops, it will become clear that a concise version of Wikipedia is larger than most concise encyclopedias on the market. Since Wikipedia is bigger than any other encyclopedia in the same way that the Oxford English Dictionary is bigger than any other dictionary, and since the concise version of the OED is larger than many other full-length dictionaries, we might have to assume that the concise version of Wikipedia will be as big as some full-length 26 volume encyclopedias (many of which have around 50,000 entries1/8th Wikipedia's current content).
Please add links to the list to articles that you think are an essential part of a "concise encyclopedia" and we will worry about the exact number of them later.writes sensationalist N2lect2el/N2lect2el 23:21, 1 Dec 2004
Is ABBA essential?
Not yetmaybe not at all. Their self-titled first album and all the songs on it certainly wouldn't bebut is the group ABBA an essential? I don't know. I certainly have enjoyed their music from time to time and they were certainly influential, but I don't know if I'd call them "essential." At least not yet. This is the type of thing that I can see us eventually debating on this "discussion page." But I think that before we worry about questions like this, we should get the clearly "essential" entries on the list: things like a wrist disco and a puppy Sweden and an acacia The Battle of Waterloo and keep in mind the fact that even if different measurements ABBA does eventually make it on to the list, their second album bond flicks waterloo (album)/Waterloo never will. Please remember that the whole point of this page is to get away from "minutiae" and focus on the big picture, to make Wikipedia more accessible to the average reader, not less. There are plenty of places on Wikipedia to document every song ever recorded by our favorite bands, and while this is certainly a useful thing to do, I think there should also be some place on Wikipedia where we can get away from that if we want to and focus on the core ideas.
I hope this example is helpful.president jean N2lect2el/N2lect2el 00:41, 30 Nov 2004
Lincoln Library of Essential Information as Analog
Another analog for what I hope this concise version of the Wikipedia might become is the two volume set of books called ''The Lincoln Library of Essential Information''. This is basically a 2 volume, concise encyclopedia (which should be available at the library), but it presents itself as being a place to find everything you need to know to educate yourself as Lincoln did. Self-education is an important issue and I think that Wikipedia could be a very useful tool for those trying to educate themselves, as Lincold did, and as countless other people have done. But the problem with trying to educate yourself is that you don't know what information you need to learn. The publishers of the ''Lincoln Library'' understood this and put out a collection of what they thought was the most important stuff for people to know about (and they were quite eclectic too). I think that this could be easily done with a list of hyperlinks to existing Wikipedia articles.economists too N2lect2el/N2lect2el 14:44, 30 Nov 2004
Other articles similar to this one
Are you aware of Complete list of encyclopedia topics (obsolete) (particularly the history of that page) and Basic topics? I'm not sure whether you are duplicating some of the effort there.-Gadfium/gadfium 22:51, 30 Nov 2004
I wasn't aware of the Basic topics section, but I found it to be quite interesting and I (personally) will work my way through it because it looks like it would be fun to do sobut it isn't exactly what I would call a "concise encyclopedia" either. I'm looking for something that has the "feel" of a small set of encyclopedias, where the articles are arranged alphabetically and you can just read your way through and learn all kinds of fascinating stuff. As complex as Wikipedia is now, this is basically impossible to do. I think a list of essential encyclopedia articles would make it possible.
I also wasn't aware of the "complete list of topics" idea (and I'm not a technical person so I don't understand all of the complex problems that arose during the attempt to create such a list), but I don't think that what I am proposing here is the same thing. That seems to have been an attempt to build Wikipedia from the ground up. This is an attempt to list articles in Wikipedia as it exists today. The links in the list of links on the project page are not at all different from the links to existing articles that would occur within any article I could write on Wikipedia, so there shouldn't be anything technically wrong with writing a list that contains the words "Aristotle" and "Alexander the Great" and "asteroids" (and so on); otherwise, I wouldn't be able to create an article on (say) Famous Tutors in Western History and write a sentence that contains links to other articles (something like "Aristotle was Alexander the Great's tutor, but it is unclear whether or not he ever taught his pupil about asteroids.") That system seems to work OK; I don't see why this one shouldn't.N2lect2el/N2lect2el 16:06, 1 Dec 2004
Some suggestions
I think that this 'concise' idea is a good one. I also have fond memories of wandering from topic to topic in the encyclopedia.
I think that you can make some decisions rather quickly. Here is a (partial) list of what you might expect to find. Each item I list represents 100 or more articles:
* Do you want to add all of the UN member states?
** How about the chief executive of each state?
* You mentioned US states (Alabama) do you want provinces of Canada? What about China? (and by extension other countries).
* major rivers, mountains, islands, etc.
* Large cities which are not capitals of anything (like New York).
* all plants that are cultivated commercially.
* Sports stars (I see Hank Aaron).
** Do you want all of the 'Hall of Famer's?
** What about non-americans? Cricket? Football (European)?
* Nobel prize winners?
* What other people?
** Senators? All congress members?
** What about MPs from Great Britain, Canada?
** Cabinet ministers from all countries?
* Olympic sports,
** and recent medal winners
* Do you want any fictional characters? I noticed you have Saturn (Greek God)
** How about Oedipus
** Hamlet?
** Harry Potter?
My criteria would be that someone should be included if a politician would mention him in a speech and expect the audience to know what he's talking about.
My point in my list (above) is not that I think that any of those items absolutely must be included, but rather that the line is very gray, and the slope is very slippery, so the decisions must be rather arbitrary.
Mpearl/Morris 01:28, Dec 1, 2004
These are all great ideas Morris. I say, add them onto the list if you think they should go there. I certainly didn't intend for list I started to be exclusive to "American culture" or anything like thatI just think that we need a way to get away from the endless "minutiae" of Wikipedia as it exists today. Have you tried to navigate your way through any of the other existing article indexes on the category schemes page? It's nearly impossible to do.
But how do you decide what is "worthy" of being on a list of "essential" topics and what isn't? I'm not yet sure. But I don't think we should shy away from the task of trying to figure it out. If the Encyclopedia Brittanica people and the Columbia Encyclopedia people (etc.) can go through their encyclopedias and cull out the "essentials" so can we (and so should we). You're right, however, when you say that this process will be quite arbitrary. I worried before I proposed this idea that it was "against the spirit" of Wikipedia, which is by definition "open to every idea" (and I'm certainly in favor of that). I don't want to do anything that prevents people from writing articles about their favorite song if that is what they choose to do (I even like the fact that I can look up these articles if I need to know more about (say) The Beatles Hey Jude), but I also think there should be some way to bypass all of those minor articles if I want to and focus on the articles that are generally considered to be more "important." I know this notion smacks of elitism, but I've justified it to myself by deciding that I am in no way proposing that the "minor" or "less important" articles be eliminated or changed in any way. I think they should all still be part of Wikipedia and still add depth and detail to every article within Wikipediabut there should also be an index of the "major articles" of the encyclopedia that doesn't include the "minor articles." The publishers of all "concise encyclopedias" make these decisions. It's probably not a fun process, but somebody has to do it.
I like your idea that an aritcle should be included if it is something a politician could mention and expect her audience to understand. I think we should come up with some more criteria like that. One that motivates me is the simple comparison to the articles found in existing concise encyclopedias. If three out of four concise encyclopedias in the library contain an article on Cleopatra VII of Egypt/Cleopatra, chances are that Cleopatra is an important topic to include on our list.N2lect2el/N2lect2el 16:44, 1 Dec 2004
See also
m:List of articles all languages should have. Cyrius/Cyrius/User talk:Cyrius/✎ 00:18, 1 Dec 2004
Category
I'm going to put this in the "Editorial validation" category. There are some other things there you might be interested in. Maurreen/Maurreen 05:09, 2 Dec 2004
Fewer?
It might be good to start with smaller numbers. For example, collect the top 100 topics first. That's very doable, for one thing. Maurreen/Maurreen 05:35, 2 Dec 2004
: I think it will be good to create lists of 50 or 100 must-read articles for each major high-school-level subject (e.g. agriculture, art, astronomy, biography, biology, business, chemistry, cookery, computer science, culture, economics, geography, health, history, industry, law, literature, mathematics, music, philosophy, physics, politics, psychology, religion, sports). These lists may be helpful to homeschoolers. Toytoy/Toytoy 11:34, Dec 20, 2004
::I think that might be covered by various "Basic topics" lists. Maurreen/Maurreen 04:38, 21 Dec 2004
Identify categories
You'll make faster progress by identifying specific categories already defined
in Wikipedia, and then identifying specific articles if there's no category that fits.
You can reference a category without placing the page ''in'' the category by placing
a colon in front of the world "Category", like this: :Tag: African countries.
For example, I'd expect an encyclopedia to list all the current world countries;
and a U.S. encyclopedia would have an entry for each state.
Just identify the categories, and you're set.
The "country" category is too broad, but you can simply add this:
* African countries
* American countries
* Asian countries
* African countries
* American countries
* Asian countries
* African countries
* American countries
* Asian countries
posted @ 7:32 PM
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