Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

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Indeed it's not a bad thing at all. I remember in the early days of wikipedia it seemed like every single Pokemon had their own article while actually notable real life topics had scant information.

Migrating all that cruft to a separate pokemon wiki was an improvement for everyone, no matter how "notable" you think Beedrill might be, it doesn't need it's own separate wikipedia article. With a separate wiki, Pokemon fans can go into as much depth and lore as they like.

Personally I think the criteria for fictional things should be even stronger. There ought to be an article about the work of fiction itself, but not articles about fictional characters or events unless they're notable outside of the work of fiction.

This keeps wikipedia about facts, not fictional canon.

e.g. Pikachu derves a separate article, Charmander does not.

To elaborate further, the Charizard article has a "Physical characteristics" section.

It's a anime / computer game. It's not a physical being, so any "physical characteristics" is not factual information, it's fictional information. Wikipedia does a poor job at separation of fact and fiction in articles about fictional beings.

> no matter how "notable" you think Beedrill might be, it doesn't need it's own separate wikipedia article

This has always been my sticking point with deletionist thinking. Why doesn't it need it's own separate wikipedia article? What's the harm in it? Are we worried that people will start treating Charizard as a real creature?

Where I see the value of notability criteria it is mostly in preventing vanity articles. Beedrill, presumably, is of general enough interest that people are willing to contribute and reference the information. Why isn't that enough?

I wish they'd give all the fantasy stuff (character in tv show, animated character, etc) something like a different background color or theme that essentially says "this is for people who want to document fantasy worlds".

What purpose would the theme change have? Is there a risk of confusion?

Wouldn't it make sense for Pokemon to have its own wiki? Sure have an article about the existence/history of the games and anime in Wikipedia, but such details as describing the various creatures could go elsewhere. That's how it works for other games. For example, there are articles about the various games in the Fallout series in Wikipedia, but the various creatures and locations don't have their own pages there. But there's an entire (in fact several) wikis dedicated to everything Fallout.

I mean, maybe it would make sense. But having the pages on wikipedia has a bunch of huge advantages -- not least of which is piggybacking on the ad-free nature of wikipedia. The size of the editorial community is much larger too.

The reason that there are wikis dedicated to "everything Fallout" is because of these deletionist sentiments. Most of these things started on wikipedia and had to migrate off because of the constant barrage of deletion fights.

Well, I don't like "deletionist sentiment" when the issue is "notability" -- obscure moths or Bulgarian poets have a legitimate reason to be in Wikipedia even if non-entomologists and non-Bulgarians may not care about them. But there is a real argument that fictional beings and places don't belong in a serious encyclopedia (even if the works they are from do exist and should be covered).

> But there is a real argument that fictional beings and places don't belong in a serious encyclopedia

I'll bite, though -- why the passive voice? What is the argument? The first blush here is that these topics are non-serious and make Wikipedia seem less serious. That's clearly a strawman though -- what's the deeper argument? I mean, for Brittanica, you only have so much print space you can use, and an article on Beedrill is a waste of paper. But Wikipedia is not printed; and while space is scarce in theory we shouldn't be rationing until the need it apparent.

I think fiction and non-fiction are worth keeping separate on a philosophical level. It isn't about saving space, it is about keeping reality and fantasy isolated from each other which is more important now than ever in the "post-truth" society.

I'm sure there's some very good reasons for it, but what exactly is the reason why there cannot be articles for very niche things like articles for each Pokemon individually listed on Wikipedia? I find the idea of having a complete tome of everything to be an incredibly neat idea!

At a guess, it's probably something like practical restraints around "not enough people monitoring for quality", or the fact that the hard drive space to save all of this information is not free and unlimited, or that simply, it might be better served by niche communities who will be devoted to caring far more about such specific topics?

I just find it frustrating that there isn't a kind of...ultra, super mega colossal set of all human knowledge of everything stored under a single digital roof. I suppose that ideal itself probably isn't practical for the reasons mentioned...it just seems so neat in concept. Just one place for everything.

> because I don't want it that way.

- some editor probably

In my handful of encounters trying to contribute to wikipedia it's always been such a frustrating experience.

"not enough people monitoring for quality" is one way to put it, but I've often found it to be one very zealous person monitoring for their idea of quality. It ends up quite frustrating, especially if you're a domain expert.

I've corrected articles where things I've written have been cited and had the changes reverted. It was enough to just give up.

> I've corrected articles where things I've written have been cited and had the changes reverted. It was enough to just give up.

I've heard about this happening enough that I stopped treating WP with any credibility whatsoever even for what should be cut & dry fact (aka: non-controversial/political topics). I've heard of people who were being quoted updating the context to more accurately reflect what they were saying and having the changes reverted. As if the person who said the thing being quoted doesn't know what they meant. Often because it didn't meet some guideline or another but more often than not because one overzealous editor has decided that the page being edited is "their page".

I learn the truth more from perusing the edit history or talk pages than from ever reading the page itself. Also despite claims of neutrality it's amazing how often pro-communist articles are heavily maintained almost exclusively by diehard self-proclaimed Marxists making politically biased edits.

Exhibit A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Holodomor

Kings of their own tiny virtual mountains. I tried once to update the Wikipedia article about my own military unit, just to update for our new location after a move and some other details about our heraldry. Basically, I was told/ordered to update it by the CO. No luck. Changes were repeatedly reversed by whatever kid/editor didn't want anyone else in thier sandbox. It remains incorrect to this day.

>As if the person who said the thing being quoted doesn't know what they meant.

What they meant at the time they said it and what they want it to mean later upon reflection, certainly could be two completely different things and should be scrutinized.

For political things sure. Now imagine you're explaining how something works on a technical level - like the physics of how induction heating works or the summary of a study where they've twisted your summary to claim the opposite of what the study and your summary actually claims. You go to correct their misinterpretation of your study and are told you are wrong and your edit reverted.

Wikipedia articles are kinda meant to be a broad view of a subject that is approachable to a general reader with no prior knowledge. You can write an article about Pikachu or Squirtle that is relevant to this type of reader. Can you really write such an article about Dartrix or Groudon?

Granted, this is also a problem with the obscure moth species articles. I think the moth species articles survive because no one really cares enough to start the crusade against them. When we used to have every Pokemon, it was a common line in deletion discussions to say "well if every Pokemon has an article, why can't <my obscure topic> have one too?" -- I think some people eventually got fed up and decided it was worth putting in the work of figuring out what the notability standards should be. What I've learned from a long time of editing on Wikipedia is that often, things are the way they are not because it's the best way, but because the project has a lot of inertia -- it's a lot of work to make a big change happen.

The concept you long for sounds a little bit like Wikidata. It's much less in-depth than Wikipedia, and just describes its subjects as structured data instead of with prose, but the notability bar on Wikidata is much much lower. Every Pokemon, every scientific article, every book, every village, every athlete, etc is generally in scope.

Please don't give the deletionists ideas. I treasure the ability to look up Victaphanta compacta and find real information, regardless of how approachable the topic of the Otways Black Snail is.

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