Why are things like tvtropes not suitable for an Encyclopedia?
I mean, you take it as obvious that such material is not suitable for WP, but I wonder why? It's not clear to me.
I mean, you take it as obvious that such material is not suitable for WP, but I wonder why? It's not clear to me.
Re: material not suitable for WP - most of it fails the notability clause. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notability_in_Wikipedia
There are so many wikis that are basically "Wikipedia, but for this particular topic that on its own isn't notable enough"—if these could all be merged into Wikipedia this way, the ecosystems of both Wikipedia and its offshoots would probably be a lot better off. The members of each wouldn't be tending only their own own walled gardens, but rather crosslinking and cross-editing more heavily—and putting things where they really belong, instead of trying to justify their inclusion into their own project of residence!
They wouldn't even need to exist "within" wikipedia physically; perhaps Mediawiki could adopt something that works for articles like Trackbacks work for blogs, where all articles from all "public encyclopaedia of [topic] project" Mediawikis show up in one another's indexes?
Culturally, however, Wikipedia seems to frown upon using this kind of link to external encyclopedias. If information is notable, it should be included in Wikipedia or one of the sister projects; if it is a source, it should be referenced as such. Any kind of 'more information' external page doesn't really have a place in such a system. So we're back to needing to 'fix' Wikipedia.
* See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map for the current list of supported interwiki prefixes.