User:Chuck Entz/Explanations

Frequently Offered Advice
Here are some concepts that I find myself explaining to people which would benefit from a more polished and thought-through presentation

Dictionaries vs. Encyclopedias

 * What they're about
 * Dictionaries are about words and phrases
 * Encyclopedias are about subjects
 * Sources
 * Descriptive dictionaries document language as it is or has been used to convey meaning, not how it should be used.
 * Usage is the only authority for definitions: If the OED says a term only means X, but if the term will be understood as meaning Y when used, than the OED is wrong. If usage changes to follow what the OED says, it's the change in usage that makes what the OED says right, not the fact that the OED said it.

Categories

 * Wikimedia categories are first and foremost a navigational device. They are used to find terms that have a given thing in common, not to assign a classification to everything.
 * The reason they should be organized in logical hierarchies is so they can be navigated without learning a lot of details.
 * Categories for a given language should be managed for easy of navigation:
 * English has tens of thousands of words for plants, so all the subcategories, sub-subcategories and sub-sub-subcategories to Category:en:Plants are necessary. A language that has fewer than 100 known words for plants will do fine with the one language-specific version of Category:Plants and maybe a few subcategories