Template talk:Dyoh

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[edit] Misleading sentence

This sentence in Template:Dyoh ends with a claim that overstates the truth a bit:

Letting someone else do your homework makes you learn nothing in the process, nor does it allow Wikipedians to fulfill their mission of ensuring that every person on Earth – including you – has access to the total sum of human knowledge.

In fact, Wikipedia only wants to publish a relatively tiny subset of human knowledge, excluding breathtakingly vast categories (see: WP:NOT). A factually correct wording would be:

Letting someone else do your homework makes you learn nothing in the process, nor does it allow Wikipedians to fulfill their mission of ensuring that every person on Earth – including you – has access to an absolutely large but proportionately tiny subset of the total sum of human knowledge.

As an example, articles about software purposely exclude the kind of detailed information that enables a person to actually use a piece of software: program manuals and extensive collections of examples. This is unfortunate, because the software manuals available elsewhere are typically short on examples of how to use a software program, and a wiki is an excellent tool to allow a user community to aggregate useful examples from their personal experience (which would amount to original research, but is directly verifiable just by running the examples through the software in question). That sort of content is appearing and will continue to appear on other wikis, but not on Wikipedia under its current policies. For an example of an organization which does aim to index all human knowledge, see Google. --Teratornis 19:08, 5 March 2007 (UTC)