Wikipedia talk:List of 2007 Macropædia articles

Impressive list!
Wow, this is an impressive amount of work. I guess there's a bit of a challenge in correlating our articles with Britannica's, since the more traditional encyclopedias have one long article that covers many aspects of a topic, and we tend to have a lot of smaller articles instead. (History of Western architecture and technology of war for example, don't exist, but there's a whole series of articles on their subtopics.) But we've actually got a lot more covered than I would've thought. Not surprisingly, our most deficient categories seem to be art, religion, and non-Western history.

The specific topics chosen in Britannica seem to be a bit odd to me - Ansel Adams gets an article, but not protein? Virtual reality but not Internet? Also surprised at the number of religion and philosophy articles in Britannica, which seem overrepresented (Christianity, massively so). Maybe my biases are showing.

Did you link this from the missing articles project? Since they seem to have similar lists for less authoritative or more specific reference works, they'd probably like this one too. It'd be interesting to do a corresponding quality assessment on our articles - I'm not sure they can be objectively compared to their Britannica equivalents, but even their quality compared to our own average would be interesting. I suspect that these rather general articles will be, on the whole, rather mediocre, with an underrepresentation of FAs compared to the overall percentage. I get the impression that our very broad/basic articles tend to be rather poorly maintained, while more specific topics get worked on because they attract the attention of one or a few specialized editors. (Of course, I'm almost entirely thinking of the traditional academic disciplines rather than the pop culture/internet meme/current event type articles, which I have a generally low impression of, but that may be because I only ever read them when they come up for AfD :) I started doing a quick test assessment of a few articles, but it seems that many of the ones I randomly picked are not assessed by Wikiprojects, and I don't have an unbroken block of time to read and judge them (plus I'm just about as unqualified as one can get to assess, say, Calvinism, or Italian literature). Opabinia regalis 06:20, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Samuel Johnson - should he really be "Biography, Philosophic" and not "Biography, Literary"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Exile (talk • contribs) 12:46, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Misleading title
The title of this page strikes me as a little odd - can't all of those Macropedia articles be found on Wikipedia? That is, none of them seem to be redlinks, so perhaps this page should be renamed to something more accurate. --Gwern (contribs) 13:30 18 November 2006 (GMT)

comment and question
Nice list! Two questions, should the FA/GA pictures be placed in front of the name, just after the number? Like so
 * 1) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|Good article|14px]] Charles Darwin

Secondly, should we insert other unofficial ratings such as 'B' for Dance? Unfortunately, there's no icon for B and others. It would be nice to know which are at a stub level. Good work! 129.120.94.187 17:34, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Automata theory
Automata theory is part of Computer Science, so it should be listed under Computing rather than Mathematics. Leibniz 16:38, 21 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi, Leibniz, I'm a huge fan of your namesake &mdash; I was smitten after translating his dialogue, Confessio philosophi. ;)


 * You're quite right, I meant to include Automata theory under CS but it slipped my mind in the hurly-burly. Sorry!  Similar to its neighbour Cryptography or Information theory, it's a little hard to categorize.  Thanks for your sharp-eyed correction, Willow 17:39, 21 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for fixing it so promptly! Leibniz 17:46, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Automata theory might be nice for a featured article drive. It is not exactly riveting reading at the moment (stub class?), but the topic could be presented quite intuitively with diagrams and animations. Leibniz 03:25, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

POV
I was somewhat jarred by this line: "Nevertheless, it is historically evident that Buddhism is an older and more complex religion, with many more varied schools of thought and sacred texts." Do we have a citation for this? Or can we just excise it completely? The list is great, and I'm surprised that anyone had the time to write it up, but the first few introductory paragraphs seem uncomfortably filled with certain ill-fitting segues ("Interestingly", "Presumably", "Nevertheless", "More generally") and further odd assertions. It's probable that I'm merely ignorant of the depth and breadth of Buddhism, but making an assertion on such a grand scale, an assertion which would require intimate knowledge and familiarity with both religions, their sects, their scriptures, their sacred forms of worship, and the whole gamut of their theologies, seems something beyond most individuals, and contrary to the NPOV policies of the Wiki.

I'm also unable to parse one of the statements within that sentence. Does "with many more varied schools" mean that Buddhism contains a greater number of "varied schools", a greater number of eccentric schools, or is it really two propositions blended into one, and is Buddhism both in possession of more schools of thought, and a greater range in its thinking? Also, why are the Bs and As displayed using odd Etruscan letters rather than our more modern Arial or Times New Roman typefaces?

Much good work is being done here besides, and this whole project is quite admirable. Please don't take my criticism as any sort of affront to your persons. It's probably merely a result of my own insecurities that I've even made this comment. Many thanks for dealing with my personal insecurities, and good luck with the rest of the project.

Sincerely, Geuiwogbil 16:31, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Guidance on red links?
I think we can move most of the red links to at least "start" in less than 30 minutes of work per link. In almost all cases, the red link is an overview article for which Wikipedia already has several detailed articles.

My question is: should we bother to do this?

Argument in favor: It's easy and it is fairly inexpensive. Each such article will consist primarily of links to existing articles, with some explanatory text.

Argument against: If we do this we are in essence allowing Britanica to dictate our taxonomy. Wikipedia has evolved its own taxonomy that uses different criteria than the Macropædia: why should we let them dictate a taxonomy?

My opinion: By contrast to biology, there is no reason to restrict Wikipedia to a single hierarchy.Therefore, we should go ahead and create new articles for each of the red links.

Unless I see a dissenting option, I will start on this aproximately 20 hours from now. -Arch dude 04:07, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Legal issues with this list?
Last time we had article lists from Britannica (and Encarta) they were deleted because of concern over copyright. See this letter from Jimbo: Are we sure this is okay in a way the other lists apparently weren't? Haukur 12:28, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

WP Alternative?
I noticed that some of the articles offered a WP Alternative, but were still red links. After reading the summary goals, it's a bit unclear to me if the idea is to create a 1:1 Wikipedia version, allowing anyone to enter a Britannica article title to see the Wikipedia version, or to just provide the same information the Wikipedia way. I have mixed opinions about that, but if the consensus is yes, then shouldn't there be redirects to the Alternative? -sHARD 17:52, 5 July 2007 (UTC)


 * I think the idea is to cover these topics in similar detail/better quality than Brit. . So proper redirects for red links would be great. Voorlandt 19:23, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Merits of ranking articles?
After poking around some more (see my previous question above), I read a short history on Macroædia, which seems to indicate that it currently focuses on a very condensed format. Not in content, but rather in subdivision. Many articles are extremely long, whereas on Wikipedia they are instead subdivided. A good example is Buisness law. While Macro has 26 pages devoted to the subject, Wikipedia only has a stub. However, looking deeper you will find an entire category devoted to the information, the Corporate law article, and the List_of_business_law_topics. So the information on Wikipedia may be even better than what exists on Macro, but it is far more categorized. Rather than having page turns to get to a specific topic, the Wiki simply has links. The problem is the current rankings don't reflect this at all. I'm willing to bet many more articles are in far better shape than currently indicated. I should mention this is a general challenge I see on various projects, but as a lowly editor who's been around awhile but not made many edits, I'll start with a smaller project like this. Any ideas? -sHARD 20:13, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

On the specific example you give, I am not sure what the best would be. For other general topics it is nice to have an overview article. A good example from the list is chess, which gives pointers to the more detailed articles chess strategy, chess openings, computer chess, etc.. Voorlandt 08:22, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Missing articles: 549 in "Organized by Wikipedia category" vs 699 in Macropædia
Hello. There 549 articles in the "Organized by Wikipedia category" section, out of 699 total in Macropædia. How to find the 150 missing ones please? Net1102 (talk) 08:20, 5 June 2021 (UTC)