12 ms·

Twenty years after Pokémon launched, its impact on Wikipedia remains

225 points by jaybosamiya 11y ago

xlayn 11y ago
I have always wondered how the systems evolved. Why Karen and her far cousin can't have their own Wikipedia pages? It's not like it's going to be printed and more Pokemon is less about the chemical elements, so what if half Wikipedia it's about Pokemon? or Star Wars? if the pages are up to the standard there is no reason for not being included. This reflects how the people related to this topics are just more knowledgeable (about the topic) and willing to cooperate to the Wikipedia than other groups.
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  > Why Karen and her far cousin can't have their own Wikipedia pages? Well, if Karen is a bit character, it may be hard to find information about Karen that's up to the standards of Wikipedia sources. If there are only one or two sentences available to reference in any sources, it doesn't make for much of an article, and it might be more practical from an information-organization standpoint to have a mention of Karen combined into a page about the series in general. Most minor Pokémon seem to share pages, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_(52%E2%80%93101)#Bellsprout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_(52%E2%80...
  - xlayn 11y ago
    >it may be hard to find information about Karen that's up to the standards of Wikipedia sources that's a fair reason but I suspect your second point is more relevant >and it might be more practical from an information-organization standpoint to have a mention of Karen combined into a page about the series in general quoting report "The world probably doesn’t need zillions of explanatory articles about the Japanese video game franchise Pokémon." why? if people are willing to devote their time to the task I don't see a reason why their work shouldn't be preserved. On the other side I do also understand the reason behind it "keep a standard" but for the same reason you can't get technical on technical topics and we have the simple English entries. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen Maybe just as we have the simple entries we should also have anime and sci-fi.
    - CM30 11y ago
      I guess they just don't want to be seen as competing with all the other wikis for specific franchises. Bulbapedia exists for Pokemon stuff, Mario Wiki for Mario stuff, Wookiepedia for Star Wars, Memory Alpha for Star Trek... They want to be seen as a place for knowledge about a variety of topics, not one that's heavily focused on a single subject.
      - chaosfox 11y ago
        thats a great point, look at the Karen page on bulbapedia: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Karen http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Karen, there are lists of pokemons she uses on every game she appears, their movesets, quotes from her, artwork, appearences on the manga and trivia. I personally lean toward inclusionism but I don't really think any of this information fits wikipedia.
      - fennecfoxen 11y ago
        Wikipedia and the Pokémon wars predate these wikis. Note that many of these are hosted with Wikia (originally named Wikicities), which was Jimmy Wales's next venture after founding Wikipedia (he's moved on to The People's Operator). Wikicities was launched sometime 2005ish, but Pokémon articles and no-name garage bands were already a hot issue at the time. (goodness, has it been 11 years?)
    - fennecfoxen 11y ago
      >> "The world probably doesn’t need zillions of explanatory articles about the Japanese video game franchise Pokémon." > why? if people are willing to devote their time to the task I don't see a reason why their work shouldn't be preserved. These sentiments don't need to be at odds with each other. Instead of zillions of (very small) explanatory articles of a half-paragraph each, we can have a few dozen (large) ones with the same informational content and much less overhead in how they're organized and maintained, especially when they all share the same information sources, while big names like Pikachu with unique significance can get their own articles.
      - 11y ago
- Aissen 11y ago
  Yes, deletionnists are driving people to other venues. Wikia often claims to run the world's biggest wiki once you aggregate all their communities. It's sad that the Wikimedia foundation let the deletionnists destroy so much value in Wikipedia without providing an alternative (like dedicated community wikis).
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    I'm curious, what article was deleted that you can cite as an example of destruction of knowledge? edit: it's a serious question! Instead of down voting, just tell me. Or even downvote, but at least tell me.
    - michaelwww 11y ago
      Deletionpedia is no longer kept up but I used to enjoy browsing it to see what was deleted . http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php
      - detaro 11y ago
        Some observations from looking through these: * Huge amounts of various fictional universe lore, similar to the article * quite a few bands * some percentage of articles exists again, with better content
      - michaelwww 11y ago
        The discussion over deleting "Boomerang Engineer" is kind of funny. "totally improbable specialization. Throw it away (and hope it doesn't return):" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Boomerang_engineer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
    - lmm 11y ago
      A couple of local (or internet-local) bands. One BBC documentary about a particular subculture that I was interested in at the time. One (fairly obscure, but involving some minor technical firsts) video game. All pop-cultural ephemera perhaps, but the sort of thing that qualifies as knowledge in my book.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  This is actually one of the first concepts enshrined in Wikipedia in the early days, "Wikipedia is not paper". There is a whole page discussing what WP is not which describes this idea. Like all things in an anarchist project, this set of bylaws was the product of a long discussion over decades by the editing community. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not&redirect=no#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wi...
- scott_s 11y ago
  Yes, a Wikipedia page is not on a physical resource like paper, so it does not have the resource costs that old-school encyclopedia's have. But I have always felt that argument to be besides the point. There still is a limited resource at play, and that is time and effort for editors. I can see how including as much as possible by that rationale could lead to something that is not manageable. I am not certain that is true, but it seems reasonable that it could be true. That is the point to argue against, not the one about physical media.
  - DasIch 11y ago
    It's also a question of maintanance. What does it matter, if you have articles on every little thing but 3/4 of them are outdated? People critizize Wikipedia based on the concept already quite a bit. If you can't maintain article quality for all articles to a reasonable level, it ends up hurting the project.
    - snowwrestler 11y ago
      That argument falls down when one can point to a very well-maintained wiki hosted elsewhere. If the Star Trek wiki is well-maintained where it is, then it seems reasonable to assume that if were wholly incorporated within Wikipedia, it would be just as well maintained there.
      - scott_s 11y ago
        I sometimes visit such wikis, and my feeling is they often wouldn't fit in Wikipedia. It's mainly an issue of perspective. Take, for example, these two entries on the same fictional character: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Aerith_Gainsborough http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Aerith_Gainsborough, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerith_Gainsborough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerith_Gainsborough The one from the Final Fantasy Wiki is from the perspective of a Final Fantasy fan, and is generally for a Final Fantasy fan. That is, it's explaining how Aerith relates to the rest of Final Fantasy. Some of it flirts with being in-fiction. The Wikipedia article is more about how Aerith the fictional character relates to the real world. My point is that the people who want to maintain the versions that are more in-fiction may not also want to maintain versions that are more focused to how this fictional thing relates to the real world.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rsync 11y ago
  "Why Karen and her far cousin can't have their own Wikipedia pages?" They absolutely can, and it would not negatively impact anyone, anywhere. It would also be (essentially) zero cost. The reason that they do not have their own pages (and the same reason that you or I will almost certainly fail in making a new wikipedia page, regardless of quality or correctness) is that for a small, sad, lame subset of wikipedia users, page creation confers (perceived) status[1] and these little hitlers will spend more time and energy than you can possibly muster to protect and enhance that status. It is the promise of wikipedia, betrayed and shit all over. [1] I shit you not. Yes, I know it's inconceivable.
  - zanny 11y ago
    Why haven't we seen a successful wikipedia fork yet that doesn't have this hijacking by deletionists problem?
    - j-pb 11y ago
      [Network effect.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) Also due to this Wikipedia is build into a lot of things, like google search, or iOS Siri.
    - Goronmon 11y ago
      My experience has been that the only people with the desire to put effort into an alternative are mainly interesting in making sure there are so many flash ads on every single page that it can crash your browser.
- cooper12 11y ago
  If it's up to standard, any article is welcome. The trouble is readers and new editors don't know these standards and since they see articles on every common topic, assume that Wikipedia is all-encompassing. Wikipedia relies on the concept of "notability", (whether something warrants an article) which in turn is informed by the presence of "reliable sources" for the purpose of "verifiability". These are the main reasons why Karen can't have a Wikipedia article: there is not enough written about her in published sources to write a verifiable article. You might ask how come it can't all just be based on the Pokemon universe and information in the episodes? That's a valid question. However, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia which needs to include real-world information such as what critics think of something, publication details, themes, etcetera... You can't have that without reliable sources and relying on fiction alone would lead to "original research". (Things in quotes are official Wikipedia policies which you can read by typing the "WP:" prefix and the term in the search box) As for how the system evolved, it started getting more strict as Wikipedia got more popular and was scrutinized. The Seigenthaler incident[0] in particular led to a restriction on new editors creating articles. No system can grow unchecked in my opinion; it was only natural that as Wikipedia grew more prominent, it became less inclusive. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biography_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biograp...
  - j-pb 11y ago
    Why not have a multi tier system in which articles are marked with their validity? The internet will probably replace "published sources" becoming the place where "original research" is done. If wikipedia hold on to this outdated standard of correctness it will fall into oblivion with the rest of paper media. Wikipedia could have become the next publishing platform, with cryptographically signed articles/papers, and cryptographically signed peer review. I would rather trust a wikipedia article that has been signed by a thousand watchful eyes, than a scientific article that has been looked at by a couple researchers and publishers.
- njharman 11y ago
  > if the pages are up to the standard there is no reason for not being included. Pages are not free, they come with a maintenance cost. If everything (or even a significant percentage of everything) was allowed most of it would grow to be low quality. Which would make it less useful, which would make less people use/improve it, which leads to death spiral. We already have a something with "everything" it's called the Internet. Wikipedia is (and should be) a limited subset of that. I do think their notability requirements are maybe too high and vague. But, I don't have a better alternative.
  - Panoramix 11y ago
    It is user generated content, so I don't see a clear relation between the number of articles and "low quality". Furthermore, as I understand it what you write goes against the Wikimedia vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment." Also, you don't "browse" wikipedia, you go there seeking specific knowledge. If that knowledge is not there, you move on.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      Wikipedia GA, A, and FA articles aren't typically just contributed by a single user. They're a team effort, built up by barely-coordinated teams of strangers. The point of the project is to build a system that generates "A" articles based solely on volunteer effort.
    - vacri 11y ago
      > Also, you don't "browse" wikipedia The Wikipedia homepage, the 'random article' link on the sidebar, and the XKCD strip (https://xkcd.com/214/ https://xkcd.com/214/) all directly oppose this notion.
    - njharman 11y ago
      I create an article on "bob", my pet cat. It says "bob" is a domesticated feline owned by Norman. Because I'm lazy I never update it when "bob" gets run over. Because it is such obscure topic, no one else updates it either. No one thinks to link it to accident report (one that killed poor bob). Non one ever expands on the life of "bob". No one updates it with link to cat species page, or the Norman page, or pets page. That is very, very "low quality". It becomes wrong over time and never had much info to begin with. That is obviously extreme end of spectrum. But the same issues occur for many, many topics for long ways along spectrum away from obscurity. Wikipedia works causer there is a critical mass of people willing to create, expand, keep up to date any given topic. Topics need to be "notable" enough to reach that critical mass or else they rot. And rot reduces the value of entire thing. I "browse" wikipedia, both the random link some else mentioned and by following links. Some, when they find knowledge is not there, try to add it.
- boomlinde 11y ago
  > This reflects how the people related to this topics are just more knowledgeable (about the topic) and willing to cooperate to the Wikipedia than other groups. Since there are large groups of people that can't regularly access Wikipedia or have limited resources to edit it for other reasons I'd say that this isn't necessarily a valid conclusion. I lean slightly towards the deletionist's point of view. Bias on Wikipedia is often only considered within the scope of individual articles -- that articles may use a biased set of sources or are written in a way that represents a non-neutral POV -- but I think that the selection of articles itself has a similar ability to represent a biased view, perhaps some form of publication bias. What is included and excluded in Wikipedia unfortunately is highly representative of the views and opinions of its most active and opinionated editors. There is no policy on what should be included or not that is clear enough to prevent editor wars.
  - j-pb 11y ago
    Why not solve that problem by having a indicator on every article on estimated quality and bias?
- tptacek 11y ago
  Karen and her far cousin can have a Wikipedia page, if: 1. there are reliable secondary sources to cite for any claim the article makes, and 2. the page fits in with other coverage of the same subject. Both factors are problematic for Karen (or were), but (2) is the bigger problem, because Wikipedia already has well-groomed (GA-status) coverage of Pokemon, and that coverage already includes Karen. You can't come in an reorganize Pokemon coverage on WP without getting buy-in from the people who built up and maintained the GA articles that already exist.
- vacri 11y ago
  If someone is not publicly notable, why should they have their own Wikipedia page? And if all 7 billion of us get our own page, that's going to create a shitload of name collisions. There's only one entity called Dexter Jettster, but there are a hell of a lot of John Smiths out there. Likewise, despite my own surname being pretty rare and my first name being somewhat unpopular, there are still (at least) four of us in my country alone. If someone isn't publicly notable, then you have the above issue of name collision causing chaff, plus not having public sources to describe them appropriately (if they did, they'd be publicly notable). Perhaps turn your question on it's head: Why not make the Pokemon wiki a general wiki? If 'pages are free' and you're not forced to look at the content, why shouldn't specialist wikis all work as general wikis? So what if Pokemon wiki is half about the Premier League and knitting, as the Pokemon information is still there? > This reflects how the people related to this topics are just more knowledgeable (about the topic) and willing to cooperate to the Wikipedia than other groups. Wikipedia is a general interest encyclopaedia, others are niche interest encyclopaedias. A general interest encyclopaedia is usually better off with smaller, easy-to-digest articles, leaving detailed treatises to the specialists. In a general wiki, having [minor] characters grouped together makes a lot more sense, whereas in a specialist wiki, the separate-page-per-character model is better. I also think that many Wikipedia detractors simply assume that Every Wiki That Is Not Wikipedia does not have rabid editors. Likewise, there are plenty of wikis out there that don't even allow public edits.
dropdatabase 11y ago
Hadoop could have been a good Pokémon name
- geofft 11y ago
  https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/ https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/
  - bluehawk 11y ago
    That was wonderful. I did awful.
  - CM30 11y ago
    Wasn't as bad as I thought it was, since I got all the questions right. Then again, I know a decent amount about Pokemon and enough about big data that I could say 'well, this doesn't sound like a Pokemon I've heard of, it must be big data'.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  Hoopa was released as a Gen VI Pokemon: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Hoopa_(Pok%C3%A9mon) http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Hoopa_(Pok%C3%A9mon)
minimaxir 11y ago
It's worth nothing that the Pokemon Wikipedia, Bulbapedia, is extremely extensive, especially when it comes to obscure game mechanics: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page The coolest page IMO is how Pokemon Capture works: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Catch_rate http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Catch_rate
- JoshGlazebrook 11y ago
  This was a nice read as well: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Missingno http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Missingno. As I distinctly remember using this glitch on cinnabar island after talking to the old man to duplicate whatever item was 6th in your item inventory list (rare candies for me).
  - CM30 11y ago
    If you're after more info like that, there's actually a Pokemon wiki specifically for stuff like Missingno. Namely, Glitch City Laboratories: http://glitchcity.info/wiki/index.php/GlitchDex http://glitchcity.info/wiki/index.php/GlitchDex It's got a page on Bulbapedia itself: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Glitch_City_Laboratories http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Glitch_City_Laborator... It's pretty incredible how much information these sites have.
- JimDabell 11y ago
  That's a wiki, not Wikipedia. "Wiki" is a type of website/software, and "Wikipedia" is the name of one particular wiki. Wikipedia is a wiki, but only one wiki is Wikipedia.
  - splawn 11y ago
    I just googled on bing that my band-aid is an adhesive bandage.
  - timClicks 11y ago
    Language doesn't obey these kinds of arguments. The non-tech world thinks wiki means Wikipedia. You can lament that, but you can't ever turn things back.
larrik 11y ago
The headline makes it sound like Pokemon is newer than Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is only 15 vs Pokemon's 20...
Peroni 11y ago
Poké API is coming up to 54 million API calls - pokeapi.co People still love Pokemon it seems
w84t1me 11y ago
Psyduck... Psyduck... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyduck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyduck
twhb 11y ago
What is the (argued) benefit is to excluding information? “Often what is not said is more important than what is said.” is vague and unsatisfying.
powera 11y ago
As a proud deletionist (philosophically, not actively), I feel I need to respond to a bunch of the comments here. This claim that any fact, no matter how obscure and how specific, should be on Wikipedia is maddening. Have you heard of the Library of Babel? If you index everything, eventually you will have no knowledge at all, just madness. And as for the claims that subsections or whatever will solve this problem, in practice the way they do this is through other wikis. I don't see any reason why the list of Ivysaur's attacks should be on Wikipedia. Just because it's knowledge doesn't make it useful. And in response to the question "what's the harm?", there's always a cost to having data. If Wikipedia editors have to manage the Pokemon community, have to prevent links to obscure Pokemon concepts from polluting the Abraham Lincoln article, that's time they can't do something else.
kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
And yet Nimlang had to fight for over a year to get a page that could survive the deletionistas.
sgentle 11y ago
I've struggled for a long time with the deletionism/completionism divide. I was initially strongly completionist for the reasons many others have said: this could be the repository of all human knowledge, no matter how trivial, and why would we give up that dream? To save on hard disk space? But my viewpoint these days is that Wikipedia's size has the same kind of problems that code size does. More code isn't bad in itself. After all, if that code doesn't interact with your code, you can just ignore it. Something like a zillion-line OO project with tightly defined interfaces gives you that property. However, there is an inevitable maintenance burden that comes with the size of your project. If you want to change code conventions, or update some library that is used throughout the codebase, or even just try to keep the project to a certain standard, those actions are all difficult in proportion to the number of lines of code. In Wikipedia's case, they don't even have access to the same kinds of push-around-huge-mountains-of-code tools that developers can use to manage this problem. They have tools, sure, but a fundamental part of Wikipedia's model is that it is unstructured (or at best semi-structured) data, just one big text field, and so any automated transforms are necessarily limited. So Wikipedia makes up for its fuzzy data model by just throwing people at the problem. For it to be the sum of all human knowledge means it needs proportionally many editors to maintain that knowledge. If there ever could be enough editors to do that, and if there could be a structure that would allow them to organise themselves, I'm not sure Wikipedia is it. The problem is that Wikipedia can't regulate the number of volunteer editors in the project. If the encyclopedia gets too big for the editors to manage, large chunks of it will just atrophy and there'll be nothing they can do about it. Worse still, editors will leave because they are unable to handle the burden which only makes the problem worse. So I'm not sure that completionism is actually feasible, at least not with the structure as it is now. I still dream of that repository of all knowledge, no matter how trivial, but I just don't know how we get there.

225 points by jaybosamiya 11y ago

xlayn 11y ago

I have always wondered how the systems evolved. Why Karen and her far cousin can't have their own Wikipedia pages? It's not like it's going to be printed and more Pokemon is less about the chemical elements, so what if half Wikipedia it's about Pokemon? or Star Wars? if the pages are up to the standard there is no reason for not being included. This reflects how the people related to this topics are just more knowledgeable (about the topic) and willing to cooperate to the Wikipedia than other groups.

fennecfoxen 11y ago
> Why Karen and her far cousin can't have their own Wikipedia pages? Well, if Karen is a bit character, it may be hard to find information about Karen that's up to the standards of Wikipedia sources. If there are only one or two sentences available to reference in any sources, it doesn't make for much of an article, and it might be more practical from an information-organization standpoint to have a mention of Karen combined into a page about the series in general. Most minor Pokémon seem to share pages, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_(52%E2%80%93101)#Bellsprout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_(52%E2%80...
- xlayn 11y ago
  >it may be hard to find information about Karen that's up to the standards of Wikipedia sources that's a fair reason but I suspect your second point is more relevant >and it might be more practical from an information-organization standpoint to have a mention of Karen combined into a page about the series in general quoting report "The world probably doesn’t need zillions of explanatory articles about the Japanese video game franchise Pokémon." why? if people are willing to devote their time to the task I don't see a reason why their work shouldn't be preserved. On the other side I do also understand the reason behind it "keep a standard" but for the same reason you can't get technical on technical topics and we have the simple English entries. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen Maybe just as we have the simple entries we should also have anime and sci-fi.
  - CM30 11y ago
    I guess they just don't want to be seen as competing with all the other wikis for specific franchises. Bulbapedia exists for Pokemon stuff, Mario Wiki for Mario stuff, Wookiepedia for Star Wars, Memory Alpha for Star Trek... They want to be seen as a place for knowledge about a variety of topics, not one that's heavily focused on a single subject.
    - chaosfox 11y ago
      thats a great point, look at the Karen page on bulbapedia: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Karen http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Karen, there are lists of pokemons she uses on every game she appears, their movesets, quotes from her, artwork, appearences on the manga and trivia. I personally lean toward inclusionism but I don't really think any of this information fits wikipedia.
    - fennecfoxen 11y ago
      Wikipedia and the Pokémon wars predate these wikis. Note that many of these are hosted with Wikia (originally named Wikicities), which was Jimmy Wales's next venture after founding Wikipedia (he's moved on to The People's Operator). Wikicities was launched sometime 2005ish, but Pokémon articles and no-name garage bands were already a hot issue at the time. (goodness, has it been 11 years?)
  - fennecfoxen 11y ago
    >> "The world probably doesn’t need zillions of explanatory articles about the Japanese video game franchise Pokémon." > why? if people are willing to devote their time to the task I don't see a reason why their work shouldn't be preserved. These sentiments don't need to be at odds with each other. Instead of zillions of (very small) explanatory articles of a half-paragraph each, we can have a few dozen (large) ones with the same informational content and much less overhead in how they're organized and maintained, especially when they all share the same information sources, while big names like Pikachu with unique significance can get their own articles.
    - 11y ago
Aissen 11y ago
Yes, deletionnists are driving people to other venues. Wikia often claims to run the world's biggest wiki once you aggregate all their communities. It's sad that the Wikimedia foundation let the deletionnists destroy so much value in Wikipedia without providing an alternative (like dedicated community wikis).
- chris_wot 11y ago
  I'm curious, what article was deleted that you can cite as an example of destruction of knowledge? edit: it's a serious question! Instead of down voting, just tell me. Or even downvote, but at least tell me.
  - michaelwww 11y ago
    Deletionpedia is no longer kept up but I used to enjoy browsing it to see what was deleted . http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php
    - detaro 11y ago
      Some observations from looking through these: * Huge amounts of various fictional universe lore, similar to the article * quite a few bands * some percentage of articles exists again, with better content
    - michaelwww 11y ago
      The discussion over deleting "Boomerang Engineer" is kind of funny. "totally improbable specialization. Throw it away (and hope it doesn't return):" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Boomerang_engineer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
  - lmm 11y ago
    A couple of local (or internet-local) bands. One BBC documentary about a particular subculture that I was interested in at the time. One (fairly obscure, but involving some minor technical firsts) video game. All pop-cultural ephemera perhaps, but the sort of thing that qualifies as knowledge in my book.
astazangasta 11y ago
This is actually one of the first concepts enshrined in Wikipedia in the early days, "Wikipedia is not paper". There is a whole page discussing what WP is not which describes this idea. Like all things in an anarchist project, this set of bylaws was the product of a long discussion over decades by the editing community. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not&redirect=no#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wi...
scott_s 11y ago
Yes, a Wikipedia page is not on a physical resource like paper, so it does not have the resource costs that old-school encyclopedia's have. But I have always felt that argument to be besides the point. There still is a limited resource at play, and that is time and effort for editors. I can see how including as much as possible by that rationale could lead to something that is not manageable. I am not certain that is true, but it seems reasonable that it could be true. That is the point to argue against, not the one about physical media.
- DasIch 11y ago
  It's also a question of maintanance. What does it matter, if you have articles on every little thing but 3/4 of them are outdated? People critizize Wikipedia based on the concept already quite a bit. If you can't maintain article quality for all articles to a reasonable level, it ends up hurting the project.
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    That argument falls down when one can point to a very well-maintained wiki hosted elsewhere. If the Star Trek wiki is well-maintained where it is, then it seems reasonable to assume that if were wholly incorporated within Wikipedia, it would be just as well maintained there.
    - scott_s 11y ago
      I sometimes visit such wikis, and my feeling is they often wouldn't fit in Wikipedia. It's mainly an issue of perspective. Take, for example, these two entries on the same fictional character: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Aerith_Gainsborough http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Aerith_Gainsborough, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerith_Gainsborough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerith_Gainsborough The one from the Final Fantasy Wiki is from the perspective of a Final Fantasy fan, and is generally for a Final Fantasy fan. That is, it's explaining how Aerith relates to the rest of Final Fantasy. Some of it flirts with being in-fiction. The Wikipedia article is more about how Aerith the fictional character relates to the real world. My point is that the people who want to maintain the versions that are more in-fiction may not also want to maintain versions that are more focused to how this fictional thing relates to the real world.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rsync 11y ago
"Why Karen and her far cousin can't have their own Wikipedia pages?" They absolutely can, and it would not negatively impact anyone, anywhere. It would also be (essentially) zero cost. The reason that they do not have their own pages (and the same reason that you or I will almost certainly fail in making a new wikipedia page, regardless of quality or correctness) is that for a small, sad, lame subset of wikipedia users, page creation confers (perceived) status[1] and these little hitlers will spend more time and energy than you can possibly muster to protect and enhance that status. It is the promise of wikipedia, betrayed and shit all over. [1] I shit you not. Yes, I know it's inconceivable.
- zanny 11y ago
  Why haven't we seen a successful wikipedia fork yet that doesn't have this hijacking by deletionists problem?
  - j-pb 11y ago
    [Network effect.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) Also due to this Wikipedia is build into a lot of things, like google search, or iOS Siri.
  - Goronmon 11y ago
    My experience has been that the only people with the desire to put effort into an alternative are mainly interesting in making sure there are so many flash ads on every single page that it can crash your browser.
cooper12 11y ago
If it's up to standard, any article is welcome. The trouble is readers and new editors don't know these standards and since they see articles on every common topic, assume that Wikipedia is all-encompassing. Wikipedia relies on the concept of "notability", (whether something warrants an article) which in turn is informed by the presence of "reliable sources" for the purpose of "verifiability". These are the main reasons why Karen can't have a Wikipedia article: there is not enough written about her in published sources to write a verifiable article. You might ask how come it can't all just be based on the Pokemon universe and information in the episodes? That's a valid question. However, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia which needs to include real-world information such as what critics think of something, publication details, themes, etcetera... You can't have that without reliable sources and relying on fiction alone would lead to "original research". (Things in quotes are official Wikipedia policies which you can read by typing the "WP:" prefix and the term in the search box) As for how the system evolved, it started getting more strict as Wikipedia got more popular and was scrutinized. The Seigenthaler incident[0] in particular led to a restriction on new editors creating articles. No system can grow unchecked in my opinion; it was only natural that as Wikipedia grew more prominent, it became less inclusive. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biography_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biograp...
- j-pb 11y ago
  Why not have a multi tier system in which articles are marked with their validity? The internet will probably replace "published sources" becoming the place where "original research" is done. If wikipedia hold on to this outdated standard of correctness it will fall into oblivion with the rest of paper media. Wikipedia could have become the next publishing platform, with cryptographically signed articles/papers, and cryptographically signed peer review. I would rather trust a wikipedia article that has been signed by a thousand watchful eyes, than a scientific article that has been looked at by a couple researchers and publishers.
njharman 11y ago
> if the pages are up to the standard there is no reason for not being included. Pages are not free, they come with a maintenance cost. If everything (or even a significant percentage of everything) was allowed most of it would grow to be low quality. Which would make it less useful, which would make less people use/improve it, which leads to death spiral. We already have a something with "everything" it's called the Internet. Wikipedia is (and should be) a limited subset of that. I do think their notability requirements are maybe too high and vague. But, I don't have a better alternative.
- Panoramix 11y ago
  It is user generated content, so I don't see a clear relation between the number of articles and "low quality". Furthermore, as I understand it what you write goes against the Wikimedia vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment." Also, you don't "browse" wikipedia, you go there seeking specific knowledge. If that knowledge is not there, you move on.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Wikipedia GA, A, and FA articles aren't typically just contributed by a single user. They're a team effort, built up by barely-coordinated teams of strangers. The point of the project is to build a system that generates "A" articles based solely on volunteer effort.
  - vacri 11y ago
    > Also, you don't "browse" wikipedia The Wikipedia homepage, the 'random article' link on the sidebar, and the XKCD strip (https://xkcd.com/214/ https://xkcd.com/214/) all directly oppose this notion.
  - njharman 11y ago
    I create an article on "bob", my pet cat. It says "bob" is a domesticated feline owned by Norman. Because I'm lazy I never update it when "bob" gets run over. Because it is such obscure topic, no one else updates it either. No one thinks to link it to accident report (one that killed poor bob). Non one ever expands on the life of "bob". No one updates it with link to cat species page, or the Norman page, or pets page. That is very, very "low quality". It becomes wrong over time and never had much info to begin with. That is obviously extreme end of spectrum. But the same issues occur for many, many topics for long ways along spectrum away from obscurity. Wikipedia works causer there is a critical mass of people willing to create, expand, keep up to date any given topic. Topics need to be "notable" enough to reach that critical mass or else they rot. And rot reduces the value of entire thing. I "browse" wikipedia, both the random link some else mentioned and by following links. Some, when they find knowledge is not there, try to add it.
boomlinde 11y ago
> This reflects how the people related to this topics are just more knowledgeable (about the topic) and willing to cooperate to the Wikipedia than other groups. Since there are large groups of people that can't regularly access Wikipedia or have limited resources to edit it for other reasons I'd say that this isn't necessarily a valid conclusion. I lean slightly towards the deletionist's point of view. Bias on Wikipedia is often only considered within the scope of individual articles -- that articles may use a biased set of sources or are written in a way that represents a non-neutral POV -- but I think that the selection of articles itself has a similar ability to represent a biased view, perhaps some form of publication bias. What is included and excluded in Wikipedia unfortunately is highly representative of the views and opinions of its most active and opinionated editors. There is no policy on what should be included or not that is clear enough to prevent editor wars.
- j-pb 11y ago
  Why not solve that problem by having a indicator on every article on estimated quality and bias?
tptacek 11y ago
Karen and her far cousin can have a Wikipedia page, if: 1. there are reliable secondary sources to cite for any claim the article makes, and 2. the page fits in with other coverage of the same subject. Both factors are problematic for Karen (or were), but (2) is the bigger problem, because Wikipedia already has well-groomed (GA-status) coverage of Pokemon, and that coverage already includes Karen. You can't come in an reorganize Pokemon coverage on WP without getting buy-in from the people who built up and maintained the GA articles that already exist.
vacri 11y ago
If someone is not publicly notable, why should they have their own Wikipedia page? And if all 7 billion of us get our own page, that's going to create a shitload of name collisions. There's only one entity called Dexter Jettster, but there are a hell of a lot of John Smiths out there. Likewise, despite my own surname being pretty rare and my first name being somewhat unpopular, there are still (at least) four of us in my country alone. If someone isn't publicly notable, then you have the above issue of name collision causing chaff, plus not having public sources to describe them appropriately (if they did, they'd be publicly notable). Perhaps turn your question on it's head: Why not make the Pokemon wiki a general wiki? If 'pages are free' and you're not forced to look at the content, why shouldn't specialist wikis all work as general wikis? So what if Pokemon wiki is half about the Premier League and knitting, as the Pokemon information is still there? > This reflects how the people related to this topics are just more knowledgeable (about the topic) and willing to cooperate to the Wikipedia than other groups. Wikipedia is a general interest encyclopaedia, others are niche interest encyclopaedias. A general interest encyclopaedia is usually better off with smaller, easy-to-digest articles, leaving detailed treatises to the specialists. In a general wiki, having [minor] characters grouped together makes a lot more sense, whereas in a specialist wiki, the separate-page-per-character model is better. I also think that many Wikipedia detractors simply assume that Every Wiki That Is Not Wikipedia does not have rabid editors. Likewise, there are plenty of wikis out there that don't even allow public edits.

dropdatabase 11y ago

Hadoop could have been a good Pokémon name

geofft 11y ago
https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/ https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/
- bluehawk 11y ago
  That was wonderful. I did awful.
- CM30 11y ago
  Wasn't as bad as I thought it was, since I got all the questions right. Then again, I know a decent amount about Pokemon and enough about big data that I could say 'well, this doesn't sound like a Pokemon I've heard of, it must be big data'.
minimaxir 11y ago
Hoopa was released as a Gen VI Pokemon: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Hoopa_(Pok%C3%A9mon) http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Hoopa_(Pok%C3%A9mon)

minimaxir 11y ago

It's worth nothing that the Pokemon Wikipedia, Bulbapedia, is extremely extensive, especially when it comes to obscure game mechanics: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page The coolest page IMO is how Pokemon Capture works: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Catch_rate http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Catch_rate

JoshGlazebrook 11y ago
This was a nice read as well: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Missingno http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Missingno. As I distinctly remember using this glitch on cinnabar island after talking to the old man to duplicate whatever item was 6th in your item inventory list (rare candies for me).
- CM30 11y ago
  If you're after more info like that, there's actually a Pokemon wiki specifically for stuff like Missingno. Namely, Glitch City Laboratories: http://glitchcity.info/wiki/index.php/GlitchDex http://glitchcity.info/wiki/index.php/GlitchDex It's got a page on Bulbapedia itself: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Glitch_City_Laboratories http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Glitch_City_Laborator... It's pretty incredible how much information these sites have.
JimDabell 11y ago
That's a wiki, not Wikipedia. "Wiki" is a type of website/software, and "Wikipedia" is the name of one particular wiki. Wikipedia is a wiki, but only one wiki is Wikipedia.
- splawn 11y ago
  I just googled on bing that my band-aid is an adhesive bandage.
- timClicks 11y ago
  Language doesn't obey these kinds of arguments. The non-tech world thinks wiki means Wikipedia. You can lament that, but you can't ever turn things back.

larrik 11y ago

The headline makes it sound like Pokemon is newer than Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is only 15 vs Pokemon's 20...

Peroni 11y ago

Poké API is coming up to 54 million API calls - pokeapi.co People still love Pokemon it seems

w84t1me 11y ago

Psyduck... Psyduck... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyduck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyduck

twhb 11y ago

What is the (argued) benefit is to excluding information? “Often what is not said is more important than what is said.” is vague and unsatisfying.

powera 11y ago

As a proud deletionist (philosophically, not actively), I feel I need to respond to a bunch of the comments here. This claim that any fact, no matter how obscure and how specific, should be on Wikipedia is maddening. Have you heard of the Library of Babel? If you index everything, eventually you will have no knowledge at all, just madness. And as for the claims that subsections or whatever will solve this problem, in practice the way they do this is through other wikis. I don't see any reason why the list of Ivysaur's attacks should be on Wikipedia. Just because it's knowledge doesn't make it useful. And in response to the question "what's the harm?", there's always a cost to having data. If Wikipedia editors have to manage the Pokemon community, have to prevent links to obscure Pokemon concepts from polluting the Abraham Lincoln article, that's time they can't do something else.

kevin_thibedeau 11y ago

And yet Nimlang had to fight for over a year to get a page that could survive the deletionistas.

sgentle 11y ago

I've struggled for a long time with the deletionism/completionism divide. I was initially strongly completionist for the reasons many others have said: this could be the repository of all human knowledge, no matter how trivial, and why would we give up that dream? To save on hard disk space? But my viewpoint these days is that Wikipedia's size has the same kind of problems that code size does. More code isn't bad in itself. After all, if that code doesn't interact with your code, you can just ignore it. Something like a zillion-line OO project with tightly defined interfaces gives you that property. However, there is an inevitable maintenance burden that comes with the size of your project. If you want to change code conventions, or update some library that is used throughout the codebase, or even just try to keep the project to a certain standard, those actions are all difficult in proportion to the number of lines of code. In Wikipedia's case, they don't even have access to the same kinds of push-around-huge-mountains-of-code tools that developers can use to manage this problem. They have tools, sure, but a fundamental part of Wikipedia's model is that it is unstructured (or at best semi-structured) data, just one big text field, and so any automated transforms are necessarily limited. So Wikipedia makes up for its fuzzy data model by just throwing people at the problem. For it to be the sum of all human knowledge means it needs proportionally many editors to maintain that knowledge. If there ever could be enough editors to do that, and if there could be a structure that would allow them to organise themselves, I'm not sure Wikipedia is it. The problem is that Wikipedia can't regulate the number of volunteer editors in the project. If the encyclopedia gets too big for the editors to manage, large chunks of it will just atrophy and there'll be nothing they can do about it. Worse still, editors will leave because they are unable to handle the burden which only makes the problem worse. So I'm not sure that completionism is actually feasible, at least not with the structure as it is now. I still dream of that repository of all knowledge, no matter how trivial, but I just don't know how we get there.