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by hayleox 978 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.