Gebruiker:Ronn/EN-intro

Wikipedia, an introduction

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
That's what we're doing.

Jimmy Wales, 2004

Definitely my meaning is "summary". I wouldn't say "gist" as that word tends connote something about vagueness. But Wikipedia literally can't contain all knowledge for a number of reasons. And an encyclopedia is not, for example, a text book. And our entry on "China" for example really shouldn't be 10,000 pages long. It should provide a summary of what is known, and refer people to other sources to dig deeper. Where to stop is of course a very interesting question subject to thoughtful discussion - and of course Wikipedia can be (and is) much more comprehensive than traditional encyclopedias.

Jimmy Wales, 2015