[WikiEN-l] "Exclusion" essay

Thu Jul 20 16:05:47 UTC 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:
> That'd be cool. Let's think - what *is* the harm in boundless
> fancruft? There must be harm, or we would allow it. Perhaps it is
> simply that boundless fancruft strays too far from our mission, which
> is to produce an encyclopaedia that is not just a random collection of
> information.
> 
> Someone help me out here - we all know that it's wrong to have 600
> pages describing every fight ever shown in any Pokémon episode. But
> why?

Please don't put words in my mouth. While your hypothetical example is
extreme, I would still find it wrong only for technical reasons - each
fight description would be rather short and low on context, they'd do
much better IMO as something like [[List of Pokémon battles]]
(subdivided by season if one page is too large). It's not a random
collection of information if we apply uniform standards of quality and
structure to it.

I don't see how the "fancruft" we include is any more a "random
collection of information" than the vast amounts of sportscruft,
militarycruft, politiciancruft, and other sorts of subjectcruft that for
some reason have an air of respectability about it that recent popular
culture alone seems to lack. Who ever complains about how Wikipedia has
articles for almost every ship that happened to participate in WWII, no
matter how trivial its role? Or how there are articles about people
whose sole claim to fame is an unspectacular one-year Senate position in
Smallcounty, Iowa back in the 1820s?

I think the massive inclusiveness of Wikipedia is one of its best
traits. Wikipedia is like a specialist encyclopedia that specializes in
_everything_. When I see an article about an obscure topic I don't ask
myself "should there be an article about this in a general
encyclopedia?", I ask myself "should there be an article about this in
an Encyclopedia of Stamp Collecting, or Encyclopedia of Star Trek, or
Encyclopedia of 18th Century Railroading, or Encyclopedia of
Agriculture, etc.?"

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