[a3_nm]

As much as I think that Wikipedia notability guidelines are way too strict, I'm wondering -- is it necessarily a bad thing for editor communities to split off and create separate specialized wikis? As long as the other wikis are also under a free license (here, CC BY-SA 4.0), you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles?

[eterm]

Indeed it's not a bad thing at all. I remember in the early days of wikipedia it seemed like every single Pokemon had their own article while actually notable real life topics had scant information.

Migrating all that cruft to a separate pokemon wiki was an improvement for everyone, no matter how "notable" you think Beedrill might be, it doesn't need it's own separate wikipedia article. With a separate wiki, Pokemon fans can go into as much depth and lore as they like.

Personally I think the criteria for fictional things should be even stronger. There ought to be an article about the work of fiction itself, but not articles about fictional characters or events unless they're notable outside of the work of fiction.

This keeps wikipedia about facts, not fictional canon.

e.g. Pikachu derves a separate article, Charmander does not.

To elaborate further, the Charizard article has a "Physical characteristics" section.

It's a anime / computer game. It's not a physical being, so any "physical characteristics" is not factual information, it's fictional information. Wikipedia does a poor job at separation of fact and fiction in articles about fictional beings.

[andrewla]

> no matter how "notable" you think Beedrill might be, it doesn't need it's own separate wikipedia article

This has always been my sticking point with deletionist thinking. Why doesn't it need it's own separate wikipedia article? What's the harm in it? Are we worried that people will start treating Charizard as a real creature?

Where I see the value of notability criteria it is mostly in preventing vanity articles. Beedrill, presumably, is of general enough interest that people are willing to contribute and reference the information. Why isn't that enough?

[fsckboy]

I wish they'd give all the fantasy stuff (character in tv show, animated character, etc) something like a different background color or theme that essentially says "this is for people who want to document fantasy worlds".

[andrewla]

What purpose would the theme change have? Is there a risk of confusion?

[jhbadger]

Wouldn't it make sense for Pokemon to have its own wiki? Sure have an article about the existence/history of the games and anime in Wikipedia, but such details as describing the various creatures could go elsewhere. That's how it works for other games. For example, there are articles about the various games in the Fallout series in Wikipedia, but the various creatures and locations don't have their own pages there. But there's an entire (in fact several) wikis dedicated to everything Fallout.

[andrewla]

I mean, maybe it would make sense. But having the pages on wikipedia has a bunch of huge advantages -- not least of which is piggybacking on the ad-free nature of wikipedia. The size of the editorial community is much larger too.

The reason that there are wikis dedicated to "everything Fallout" is because of these deletionist sentiments. Most of these things started on wikipedia and had to migrate off because of the constant barrage of deletion fights.

[jhbadger]

Well, I don't like "deletionist sentiment" when the issue is "notability" -- obscure moths or Bulgarian poets have a legitimate reason to be in Wikipedia even if non-entomologists and non-Bulgarians may not care about them. But there is a real argument that fictional beings and places don't belong in a serious encyclopedia (even if the works they are from do exist and should be covered).

[andrewla]

> But there is a real argument that fictional beings and places don't belong in a serious encyclopedia

I'll bite, though -- why the passive voice? What is the argument? The first blush here is that these topics are non-serious and make Wikipedia seem less serious. That's clearly a strawman though -- what's the deeper argument? I mean, for Brittanica, you only have so much print space you can use, and an article on Beedrill is a waste of paper. But Wikipedia is not printed; and while space is scarce in theory we shouldn't be rationing until the need it apparent.

[registeredcorn]

I'm sure there's some very good reasons for it, but what exactly is the reason why there cannot be articles for very niche things like articles for each Pokemon individually listed on Wikipedia? I find the idea of having a complete tome of everything to be an incredibly neat idea!

At a guess, it's probably something like practical restraints around "not enough people monitoring for quality", or the fact that the hard drive space to save all of this information is not free and unlimited, or that simply, it might be better served by niche communities who will be devoted to caring far more about such specific topics?

I just find it frustrating that there isn't a kind of...ultra, super mega colossal set of all human knowledge of everything stored under a single digital roof. I suppose that ideal itself probably isn't practical for the reasons mentioned...it just seems so neat in concept. Just one place for everything.

[hayleox]

Wikipedia articles are kinda meant to be a broad view of a subject that is approachable to a general reader with no prior knowledge. You can write an article about Pikachu or Squirtle that is relevant to this type of reader. Can you really write such an article about Dartrix or Groudon?

Granted, this is also a problem with the obscure moth species articles. I think the moth species articles survive because no one really cares enough to start the crusade against them. When we used to have every Pokemon, it was a common line in deletion discussions to say "well if every Pokemon has an article, why can't <my obscure topic> have one too?" -- I think some people eventually got fed up and decided it was worth putting in the work of figuring out what the notability standards should be. What I've learned from a long time of editing on Wikipedia is that often, things are the way they are not because it's the best way, but because the project has a lot of inertia -- it's a lot of work to make a big change happen.

The concept you long for sounds a little bit like Wikidata. It's much less in-depth than Wikipedia, and just describes its subjects as structured data instead of with prose, but the notability bar on Wikidata is much much lower. Every Pokemon, every scientific article, every book, every village, every athlete, etc is generally in scope.

[strken]

Please don't give the deletionists ideas. I treasure the ability to look up Victaphanta compacta and find real information, regardless of how approachable the topic of the Otways Black Snail is.

[timeinput]

> because I don't want it that way.

- some editor probably

In my handful of encounters trying to contribute to wikipedia it's always been such a frustrating experience.

"not enough people monitoring for quality" is one way to put it, but I've often found it to be one very zealous person monitoring for their idea of quality. It ends up quite frustrating, especially if you're a domain expert.

I've corrected articles where things I've written have been cited and had the changes reverted. It was enough to just give up.

[Nadya]

> I've corrected articles where things I've written have been cited and had the changes reverted. It was enough to just give up.

I've heard about this happening enough that I stopped treating WP with any credibility whatsoever even for what should be cut & dry fact (aka: non-controversial/political topics). I've heard of people who were being quoted updating the context to more accurately reflect what they were saying and having the changes reverted. As if the person who said the thing being quoted doesn't know what they meant. Often because it didn't meet some guideline or another but more often than not because one overzealous editor has decided that the page being edited is "their page".

I learn the truth more from perusing the edit history or talk pages than from ever reading the page itself. Also despite claims of neutrality it's amazing how often pro-communist articles are heavily maintained almost exclusively by diehard self-proclaimed Marxists making politically biased edits.

Exhibit A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Holodomor

[sandworm101]

Kings of their own tiny virtual mountains. I tried once to update the Wikipedia article about my own military unit, just to update for our new location after a move and some other details about our heraldry. Basically, I was told/ordered to update it by the CO. No luck. Changes were repeatedly reversed by whatever kid/editor didn't want anyone else in thier sandbox. It remains incorrect to this day.

[mopenstein]

>As if the person who said the thing being quoted doesn't know what they meant.

What they meant at the time they said it and what they want it to mean later upon reflection, certainly could be two completely different things and should be scrutinized.

[Nadya]

For political things sure. Now imagine you're explaining how something works on a technical level - like the physics of how induction heating works or the summary of a study where they've twisted your summary to claim the opposite of what the study and your summary actually claims. You go to correct their misinterpretation of your study and are told you are wrong and your edit reverted.

[crdrost]

It's really not a bad idea, but the problem is structuring.

It's odd but I come back to Cantrill's "Fork Yeah" talk here.

So the basic problem is one of resources: forked wikis still have hosting costs, so they need either a patron community (often just one person) or a for-profit company (with lots of crappy ads), while Wikipedia by all accounts is rolling in the dough with very little accountability (i.e. when professors and teachers remind students "don't believe 100% of what you read on Wikipedia," the-Wiki-community is blamed moreso than Wikipedia-the-nonprofit). If you fork Wikipedia then you lose out on the resources.

Without that, you do have a "forkophobic" culture which is why you get this "governance orgy" -- the notability guidelines and so forth. But the difference is, Cantrill's software examples expect the software to have some sort of editorial control, so if the Linux or Apache foundations take on some project it's because it's used by thousands or millions of people and they don't really take kindly to "oh yeah upstream was vandalized by someone who came in and just made every request to the Apache server return 'HTTP 499 BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS'."

In Wikipedia you get this strange direct democracy by "whoever happened to show up." Deletion votes are often done with like, 20 votes or less of just random passersby. Worse, those random passersby are usually the people who visited the article in the first place and saw that it was up for deletion, so they'll say things that are nonsensical like "oh, he's a very notable figure in the XYZ community, Googling him turns up 40,000 results so clearly he is notable."

[starkparker]

> In Wikipedia you get this strange direct democracy by "whoever happened to show up." Deletion votes are often done with like, 20 votes or less of just random passersby.

20! That'd be a luxury.

Here are some of those footballer AfDs from this month that passed with 1 vote on top of the nomination. Without passing any judgment on whether the subjects are notable, see if you notice any participation trends:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

[tivert]

> Deletion votes are often done with like, 20 votes or less of just random passersby.

You don't even need that. IIRC, the "PROD" process can get an article deleted with no votes at all. All you have to do is tag the article and if no one removes it for a week, it will be deleted with no further discussion.

The caveats are you can only PROD something once, and I believe no discussion is required to delete a PROD'ed article (if anyone remembers it to want to bring it back).

[starkparker]

It's not a bad thing in concept, and probably won't be a bad thing in execution since Roads has a pretty solid core of editors moving. They've already implemented technical improvements on AARoads, like better and newer road maps. The potential is there.

It's often a bad thing in practice, much like how splitting off entirely separate social networks for specific subjects is often a bad idea. If there aren't enough people or activity, interest wanes. If the project relies on one or two heavily active editors, it collapses when they're unavailable. If you never hit critical mass for SEO or can't/don't know how to promote your content, all the work is done in a vacuum and everyone sees the Wikipedia stubs over your stuff anyway.

Fandom (as in the company), as awful as it is, largely exists by virtue of participation in the subjects where there's enough interest to facilitate it; the mass wiki-farm infrastructure gives them enough of a SEO boost to dominate even some of the wikis that fork off of Fandom to escape its policies.

> you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles?

Developing an article on a separate wiki has additional technical and administrative overhead.

CC BY-SA requires attribution. Wikipedia attributes contributions by article history. The only way to import article history is via Special:Import. You have to be an admin or have import rights to use Special:Import on Wikipedia.

If you can clear all those hurdles, then in theory you can import changes with the required attribution from another wiki. But if the imported changes conflict with changes made in parallel on Wikipedia, resolving them can be very contentious, especially if any of the editors involved disagree on the resolution. Or the import might fail, because Special:Import isn't particularly robust.

And as the forked wiki admin, do you decide to set up scheduled imports _from_ Wikipedia to keep up with upstream? These forks often split because Wikipedia is deficient in some way beyond just editing the text. AARoads' fork's use of improved maps, for instance, would probably break the article on Special:Import because it looks like they use different wiki templates and modules.

[lmm]

If the Wikimedia foundation spent its immense donation income on supporting those specialized wikis - something far more appropriate to the spirit in which it was given than what it actually gets spent on - then I'd agree with you. But in practice these other wikis are generally struggling to keep the lights on and resort to advertising, and then the censorship that follows from that.