[WikiEN-l] Re: Cruft

Tue Sep 13 02:50:00 UTC 2005

G'day Snowspinner,

<snip />

> David is right. We would be better off with disks overflowing with
> band vanity, original research, and poo jokes. Those don't do damage
> to the community and to the long term success of the project. The
> fact that we have to share the volunteers on Star Trek articles with
> Memory Alpha, and that the work can never be merged does. So does
> every other fork.

Although I'm a Trekkie myself, I think Memory Alpha is a Good Thing. 
It's somewhere for /Star Trek/ fans to list all sorts of non-notable 
trivia that doesn't belong in Wikipedia.

So what if we have to share /Star Trek/ volunteers?  Actually, as I 
write that, I can see a counter-argument brewing: Trekkies might come to 
Wikipedia to put in their two cents on some meaningless piece of cruft 
(cruft, I say!), and stay on to write about other stuff.  If they go to 
Memory Alpha alone, we've lost them altogether.  But I suspect that's 
not your actual argument.

Why is it a Bad Thing to lose /Trek/-only contributions?  Not just for 
/Trek/, but for anything where fans get a little too enthusiastic to 
judge encyclopaedic worth.  Do we need a separate article for every 
planet mentioned in passing in the /Star Wars/ movies (or in the novels, 
or cartoons, or comics, or --- it'll happen --- fanfic)?  How about 
minor /Digimon/ characters?  I've noticed that, despite the existence of 
an *entire project*, /Harry Potter/ is missing vital information on what 
happened in a paragraph of page 421 of the latest epic, /Harry Potter 
and the Thingy-Riddled Thing/.

Would it be such a great loss to lose all of this?  We're not talking 
Elf-Only Inn, here.

-- 
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

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