Talk:Herding cats

Cleanup
This page was marked for cleanup per MoS:DAB. I removed the following entries because they sound like advertising for non-notable books: I also moved the saying over to Herding cats (linguistics). – sgeureka t•c 15:50, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Herding Cats, Multiparty Mediation in a Complex World, a study of multiparty mediation edited by Chester Crocker, Fen Hampson and Pamela Aall
 * Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers by J. Hank Rainwater


 * Hi sgureka,
 * I understand why you moved those entries. I don't know who put the Crocker one back in. I put Rainwater back in because it's the earliest published reference I can find for using the phrase to refer to programmers. Some websites attribute the association with programmers to Dave S Platt. He's still on LinkedIn, so I've contacted him for comment.
 * In reference to the unsigned comment below yours, I'm wondering what the best place is for etymologies, or the origin of quotes or phrases. Not Wikipedia at all? If I get some information together I could submit it to quoteinvestigator.com. A quick search indicates this phrase isn't in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
 * At least, now that we have some earlier references, we could probably cull the list of book titles again? What do you think?
 * bpalmerau Bpalmerau (talk) 04:23, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

Culture Metaphor Is Not Encyclopedic
Cliches and cultural metaphors are worthy knowledge for educated and intellectually accomplished people. It is good to have a reference source that makes it possible for people to narrow down and standardize such metaphors, but encyclopedias are meant to be about achievement, knowledge and a composite of common understanding. Metaphor is about how the store of cultural understanding is expressed. Semantics belong in the public discussion, but in a different format than an encyclopedia. Wikipedia grows constantly and it provides a wider range of inclusion continuously. How far can Wikipedia go toward be a universal repository without being nothing more than just another search engine. "Hit the hay" was a cultural expression used earlier in the twentieth century to mean "go to bed." It's a nice expression, but does it belong in the cultural archives of an encyclopedia? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tn2si58c (talk • contribs) 18:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)