[WikiEN-l] What's so bad about Comixpedia?

Thu Sep 15 12:40:30 UTC 2005

I truly don't get it. I personally own a print set of the Encyclopedia 
Britannica, 11th edition, as well as the current Britannica on CD. But I also 
must own at least a dozen specialized "encyclopedias" that cover narrow 
topics of interest to me in depth.

I thought that there was consensus that Wikipedia a) is an encyclopedia, and 
b) is not "an indiscriminate collection of information." If so, Wikipedia has 
bounds, set not by disk space, but by a shared vision of what should be in a 
general-purpose encyclopedia.

What's so bad about dedicated organizations creating Wikipedia-like 
encyclopedias devoted to in-depth coverage of narrower topics? How is this 
different from Wikipedia breaking off "sister projects?"

As far as the end-user is concerned, if you want specialized knowledge of 
webcomics it makes sense to go to Comixpedia. And if you do a Google search 
on some relatively obscure webcomic that is in Comixpedia but not Wikipedia, 
it will find it for you just as effectively as if it had been in Wikipedia.

This sounds like a Good Thing to me. 

I mean, it's not like "I, my Wikipedia, am a jealous Wiki. Thou shalt have no 
other Wikis." How do specialized Wiki-based encyclopedias hurt us in any way? 