It would be weird for wikipedia to host, for example, every minecraft crafting recipe.
See also https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism
If they could be assured of never needing to reduce pages to not run out of money, I would have no logical objection to having a page for everything, but as someone who's donated quite a bit to them, they are most assuredly not in that position.
If the day comes that their hosting costs match or exceed their available funds, I'd much rather know that what is there is all the most important information, and not a glut of random pages that no one ever looks at.
Not to mention courses, articles, blog posts, discussion and youtube videos
The main difference would be history, the split between books and online resources, and how the older generation sees it.
It's probably easier for all parties to let the Minecraft community draw their own line on their own wiki(s) (which is exactly what happens).
I get the feeling Wikipedia will slowly become culturally irrelevant and end up in the same place as the encyclopedias, as an established and mostly frozen dataset that we'll want to keep running but won't look at 99% of the time
There would be some issues, e.g. I wouldn't want to see Minecraft recipes when I'm searching for "obsidian". But these seem solvable; niche articles could be flagged and downranked, or they could live in a satellite wiki project, or something else.
I remember seeing niche articles like this and enjoying it.
If, for instance, Wikipedia allowed articles on every human being, whether well-known or not, they'd likely have a larger problem than they already do with people creating attack articles against other people over extremely local disputes/feuds. With more notable people, they can look for other sources to confirm or deny information about those people.
Now what would the millions of articles about every TikTok influencer look like?
And then the same goes for products and companies. Every scam Kickstarter and onanistic startup would get a massive screed.
And then it all sits and rots forever once the academic retires, the influencer gets a real job, the Kickstarter vanishes and the startup folds, because no one else cares. But someone has to go around and fix the links and update templates and generally expend effort indefinitely.
On top of all that, while the article creator is still around, because the article is actually an advert, any attempt to edit it into a more encyclopaedic article is disproportionately likely to cause drama that burns up volunteer time and effort.
(1): One I saw recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Sornette
(2): Especially as many people actually good enough at collating and editing encyclopedic articles about subjects that aren't about their own media-based hobbies quickly decide Wikipedia isn't a very fun place to do that any more.
That cuts both ways. IMO Wikipedia has lost a lot of contributors by banning fun and disallowing the topics that people found interesting.
Not least, you can crosslink between Wikimedia sites, so you could just link to [[fans:Digimon:Whatevermon]] and have the content "nearby" in digital terms without drawing it under the same notability and sourcing guidelines as an article on benzene, say.
Which as you say would keep the (often very, perhaps to a fault) keen contributor to the fandom in the Wikimedia tent and might encourage them to contribute to Wikipedia and related sites as well.
Then again, the auxiliary Wikimedia sites are pretty neglected by the parent foundation which has more important things on its mind much of the time, mostly fundraising and finding novel ways to spend that money.
You mean something like Wikia?
Items can be referenced using their in-game names because there's no risk of conflict and custom templates can be created and tailored per game. Guess which one of these displays more info:
{{:Infobox:Tank}}
{{Infobox video game
| title = Factorio
| image = Factorio cover.png
| developer = Wube Software
| publisher = Wube Software
| platforms = {{cslist|[[Linux]]|[[macOS]]|[[Microsoft Windows|Windows]]|[[Nintendo Switch|Switch]]}}
| released = {{ubl|'''Linux''', '''macOS''', '''Windows'''|14 August 2020|'''Switch'''|28 October 2022}}
| genre = [[Construction and management simulation]], [[real-time strategy]]
| modes = [[Single-player]], [[multiplayer]]
| director = {{Unbulleted list|Michal Kovařík|Tomáš Kozelek|Albert Bertolín}}
| producer =
| designer = Michal Kovařík
| artist = {{Unbulleted list|Albert Bertolin|Václav Benč}}
| composer = Daniel James Taylor<br>Petr Wajsar <small>(Space Age expansion)</small>
}}
Keeping the information up-to-date is a big task for a fast-moving game. Imagine editing the card every time the dev changes the hp of the tank. The Factorio blog describes the benefits of this better than I can:
> Together with scripts, templates allow us to partially automate updating the wiki to the newest version, and alongside access to the game's source code, it is possible for me to update the wiki to a new version within a few minutes
The blog post has a lot of other interesting stuff in there as well:
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-233
A whole lot of work goes into making game wikis pleasant. I'm sure you could duplicate this all on Wikipedia as well, but that's a lot of additional work and communities already struggle to keep their Fandom wiki's up-to-date. The old Factorio wiki does not even have an article for the tank which has been in the game for years:
https://factorio.fandom.com/wiki/Combat
Out of date info is wrong info.
Did you purposefully pick one of the items that has an in-game naming conflict and a disambiguation line?
Being focused to a single game means there's only a few conflicts, but it's not zero.
An encyclopedia excluding exhaustive videogame information is reasonable.
If you don't, you end up with 20 articles for real life fish species, and 20000 articles for fish species in videogames.
Especially since we are talking about an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia is cognizant of its biases and tries to counter them.
I've personally been approached to build tech to monitor and revert changes matching keywords using residential proxy systems as a service for low-stakes clients (and declined).
Can you suggest some alternate approaches that you think would actually work? How would you approach removing the notability requirement without immediately opening the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of additional sketchy articles about niche topics that don't have enough interest to be vetted by more than one person per year?
These differing voting systems (stars, points, etc) could be normalized through some standardized process into a final reputation score. Other services could then either consider the aggregate score, or only focus on ratings from particular other services, which could be grouped into service types for convenience. Ratings are cryptographically backed and could be fuzzed to increase anonymity. Scores would also be weighted by the relative reputation of other entities. Participating services would also themselves need to maintain a high reputation for their scoring to have much weight in the aggregate.
Services could use these scores to wall of certain site features to entities without sufficient reputation, or even wholesale deny read/write access. Obviously there are particulars to work out to prevent brigading, etc. but there is a balance to strike such that farmed accounts could still quickly be punished the moment they begin spamming/astroturfing. Perhaps a flag/vouch system similar to HN could be employed. Voting rings could also be detected, though with limits given that each vote comes from an anonymized sub-key.
This system would even protect against a future where the majority of content on the web will likely be aided or entirely produced by LLMs or AI. I welcome such synthetic content, but only if it matches or surpasses the general quality of human posts on the internet (which is much worse than one might think). On top of this, users could themselves use these scores as a way to filter out content which is signed with a reputation score below some threshold.
I imagine some kind of hierarchical web, where some services are harder to gain write access to than others, allowing users to gain reputation in low-stakes environments with some level of decentralized moderation, but without compromising the integrity of higher-stakes information.
Each piece of information on the internet should be signed with some sort of introspectable reputation score, and this kind of system would make it possible without compromising privacy and security of users in any political environment.
That said, I think there is a distinction between fact and made up.
The short answer is, because it costs time and effort, and a little bit of money, to maintain all those articles, and they cause more problems than they are worth.
But I'd like if Wikipedia had 'subwikis' with that kind of stuff.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notabilit...
I can understand strict rules about reliable sources, independent point of view, or fighting SEO/spam. Still, satellite wikis could exist. Or Portals could serve as some workaround to the notability rule. Or something else.
Wikipedia is by nerds and largely for nerds, I'm sure allowing nerdy topics there would help everyone in the long run.
[1]: https://vampire-survivors.fandom.com/wiki/Vampire_Survivors_...
The notability policy predates the creation of Wikicities significantly.
- more "reputable" news sources AI generate their articles
- traditional publications are facing existential threats as their revenue source is drying out ("Google Zero"), and we can't expect their number to grow in the future
- more experts and analysts are gatekeeping their work under subscription paywalls and alternative services. Paid mailing lists for instance won't be a valid and verifiable source
It feels like at some point Wikipedia could be basically frozen if they can't adapt to the new landscape, but from the outside it doesn't look like an organization that can sensibly move on and change core parts in a pragmatic way.
My understanding is that the series of events was - stuff kept getting rejected from wikipedia, so jimmy and some other people made wikicities (now fandom). I dont think its coincidence that jimmy saw a business oportunity, but wikipedia rejecting stuff came first, and jimmy does not control wikipedia processes.
He and the employees of his organization obviously had an outsized influence on it.
Notability criterion is important.
I agree on the second point but fundamentally extensively in depth information about the inner workings of a fictional piece are best acquired from the work itself. Not gleaned from an encyclopaedia.