Wikipedia commentary/Responses to How to Build Wikipedia, Appreciate Idiosyncracy

As happens in any community, there is definitely a conflict between purity and diversity going on here. I think (almost) everyone is aware that this project is about knowledge. However, maybe not everyone agrees on what constitutes (useful) knowledge and what does not. We should try to find easy to understand criteria for judging that.

A related issue concerns the fact that we're building an encyclopedia, but a different kind of encyclopedia. What do we want to keep from traditional encyclopedias? What can or should we do without? What do we want to add, and why? (hypertext links, for instance). In my opinion, the answers cannot be found solely by looking at how traditional encyclopedias do their thing. --Seb