[WikiEN-l] Does openness dull the bleeding edge?

Mon Sep 4 23:08:54 UTC 2006

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 03:40:27 -0400, "Gregory Maxwell"
<gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

>On the first part... I don't think the existence of articles is a
>problem. A more interesting subject is the escape of pop-culture
>content, often too trivial for the pop-culture articles into other
>pages.

Very true.  I recently had a fairly bitter fight with Nintendo fans
who insist outright that the Nintendo character King Bowser Koppa is
far and away the most common use of the word bowser, so should live at
the [[bowser]] page, based on a "consensus" of Nintendo fans in a
discussion on the Nintendo article's Talk page.  Since bowser is the
Australian and NZ term for gas pump, and most dictionaries list it as
a tanker vehicle, and both are based on the genericisation of the S. F
Bowser Company's trademark, I strongly dispute their assertion, but
that did not result in them citing any actual evidence.  Anything not
flattering to pop culture is "elitist" and probably biggoted (always
spelt with two gs).  Look at the discussion on [[British shorthair]]
for example. Keeping the cruft confined to its own articles is a
never-ending task, and one which I sometimes think is doomed to fail.
At which point, in my view, the entire project will have failed; the
world has no need of another place to collect things which can be
found with the most elementary Google search.  It's the ''other''
stuff which we need Wikipedia for: bringing to the public domain
knowledge which is otherwise impenetrably buried in inaccessible
treeware.

Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG