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Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

The second domain I ever registered was for my ex-wife’s cartoon fan site for a particular Disney cartoon series back in ‘98. Her drive to digitize stills from the show and write character bios and episode summaries was something I never understood, but she was certainly dedicated.

I’d imagine all of that kind of compulsion ends up on Wikia sites and such today, but back then it was do-it-yourself. She was writing HTML in Notepad, making graphics in Paint Shop Pro, and uploading to the shared hosting site w/ FTP.

(Had she kept it going into the 2000’s I’d imagine she would have gotten a cease-and-desist from Disney.)

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I remember in the early wikipedia days, Jimmy Wales complaining (in a good natured way) how a bunch of anime series had more pages devoted to them on wikipedia then World War II.

I'm not sure how good natured it was. Eventually Jimmy founded Wikia/Fandom.com and later a lot of well-sourced fiction-work pages was expelled from Wikipedia, with Wikipedia admins (or whatever they are) bullying people into moving content to Fandom, in deletion discussions. Some remain due to some people putting up long fights. The difference in quality from the content we had in the 2000s in Wikipedia to the content we have today in Wikia/Fandom is abysmal. No sources, bad categorized, terrible interface. This was terrible for the internet.

I never particularly cared about those articles, but Fandom.com is such a terrible website that this whole move made me vow to never donate to Wikipedia or to anything involving Jimmy Wales ever again.

This is a huge issue with Wikipedia. The “importance” bar is silly when a page is basically free to host. Yet, despite this, they often remove or delete articles because they do not deem it worthy of an encyclopedia. I never understood this - it’s not a physical tome. If the knowledge is well sourced who cares what it’s about?

The bar for notability also somehow ended up a lot lower for the kinds of things that appeal mostly to the Wikipedia editor demographic, although there has been some improvement on that front in recent years.

Notability is one piece of the puzzle, but the other is ensuring that Wikipedia content is not written "in-universe". Fandom has no such restriction, and in fact skews the other way, with content being assumed to be referring to fictional people, places, and events as if real, unless otherwise noted.

I think this is a valid barrier for Wikipedia, and the desire to describe fictional worlds this way is a good signal that that content is a better fit for a more fan-oriented forum.

It used to be a popular (and true) joke that word count of the article on Jedi Knights was significantly higher than the article on historical knights.

> a particular Disney cartoon series back in ‘98

Gargoyles?

TaleSpin.

I understand that compulsion very well. I haven’t seen any TaleSpin episodes in close to 20 years now but they live in my mind crystal clear.

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