Talk:Encyclopedia and or versus dictionary

I ended up on this page because I was looking for something to do. I began with the "most wanted" page to see if there was anything interesting that I could work on. On the current list was the word "leg". The problem here was that those who had used the word and created a link were often using the word in the most ordinary sense of the human leg. To make matters worse these authors also used and linked frem the word "foot" or "feet" in its most expected sense, but the links talked about the unit of measurement. This certainly didn't help the writer's cause.

There is a lot of room for discussion when we consider the difference between a dictionary and an encyclopaedia, and I do favour a more liberal approach to determining what is an appropriate entry. Nevertheless, one must assume that a person who visits this site has a certain base level of literacy which includes an understanding of a corpus of common words in their most self-evidently ordinary usage. The use of "leg" would fall into this category, so would the use of "foot" when it's referring to what's at the end of the leg. "Foot" as a unit of measurement should remain, especially in a time where every country in the world save one is using the metric system.

I've had a great urge to de-link inappropriately linked legs and feet, but I thought that I would express myself first before acting.

Perhaps a new list is needed of words which are to be understood in their most ordinary sense, and to which links would be seriously frowned upon unless they explained departures from that usage.

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Such a list might be an endless project. Just go ahead and remove inappropriate links. That's part of editing. Vicki Rosenzweig