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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

I see what you're saying, but in practice, not really?

It would be weird for wikipedia to host, for example, every minecraft crafting recipe.

Why would that be weird? Personally I would find it convenient.

There would be some issues, e.g. I wouldn't want to see Minecraft recipes when I'm searching for "obsidian". But these seem solvable; niche articles could be flagged and downranked, or they could live in a satellite wiki project, or something else.

I remember seeing niche articles like this and enjoying it.

I am very much on the side of inclusion, but at some point, the number of users who have the ability to check the added information becomes sufficiently small that the articles become nearly impossible to maintain and fact-check. I can understand drawing a notability line somewhere.

If, for instance, Wikipedia allowed articles on every human being, whether well-known or not, they'd likely have a larger problem than they already do with people creating attack articles against other people over extremely local disputes/feuds. With more notable people, they can look for other sources to confirm or deny information about those people.

I'm also a pretty strong inclusionist at heart, but I can see also that if the living-person rules were relaxed, self-aggrandisement would proliferate like crazy. Even under the current, slightly deletionist, status-quo in a 10000 word article about some random academic (1), who is going to fact check all that spew and edit it down? The answer on that page is "no-one, for years"(2). And that's with lots of references, even if they are all his own papers and therefore not secondary sources.

Now what would the millions of articles about every TikTok influencer look like?

And then the same goes for products and companies. Every scam Kickstarter and onanistic startup would get a massive screed.

And then it all sits and rots forever once the academic retires, the influencer gets a real job, the Kickstarter vanishes and the startup folds, because no one else cares. But someone has to go around and fix the links and update templates and generally expend effort indefinitely.

On top of all that, while the article creator is still around, because the article is actually an advert, any attempt to edit it into a more encyclopaedic article is disproportionately likely to cause drama that burns up volunteer time and effort.

(1): One I saw recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Sornette

(2): Especially as many people actually good enough at collating and editing encyclopedic articles about subjects that aren't about their own media-based hobbies quickly decide Wikipedia isn't a very fun place to do that any more.

> Especially as many people actually good enough at collating and editing encyclopedic articles about subjects that aren't about their own media-based hobbies quickly decide Wikipedia isn't a very fun place to do that any more.

That cuts both ways. IMO Wikipedia has lost a lot of contributors by banning fun and disallowing the topics that people found interesting.

My comment is more of a tangent along people/products but certainly I agree in that I don't see why the wider Wikimedia group of sites including things like Wikibooks needed to completely evict "fun" content, even if I personally don't think it should be in some language's Wikipedia itself.

Not least, you can crosslink between Wikimedia sites, so you could just link to [[fans:Digimon:Whatevermon]] and have the content "nearby" in digital terms without drawing it under the same notability and sourcing guidelines as an article on benzene, say.

Which as you say would keep the (often very, perhaps to a fault) keen contributor to the fandom in the Wikimedia tent and might encourage them to contribute to Wikipedia and related sites as well.

Then again, the auxiliary Wikimedia sites are pretty neglected by the parent foundation which has more important things on its mind much of the time, mostly fundraising and finding novel ways to spend that money.

Every project needs a scope.

An encyclopedia excluding exhaustive videogame information is reasonable.

If you don't, you end up with 20 articles for real life fish species, and 20000 articles for fish species in videogames.

Especially since we are talking about an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia is cognizant of its biases and tries to counter them.

wikipedia is for everyone; fandom is for fans, aka fanatics

> they could live in a satellite wiki project

You mean something like Wikia?

Perhaps - but still managed by the foundation and not run as a for profit project.

It's not really about what you would find convenient. It's about what Wikimedia wants to spend its limited resources on. It has decided it wants to spend its resources on something it believes to be a reasonable subset of general knowledge and information. Where to draw that line is highly subjective, but they have to try to find a good balance.

Wikimedia spends the vast majority of its resources on stuff that has a lot less to do with traditional-Wikipedia than a Fandom competitor would.

The Wikimedia Foundation has not decided this, the community of editors has, through years of debate and eventual consensus.

Game wiki's often have custom UIs that are designed to make browsing game data a better experience. I'll be using Factorio as an example:

https://wiki.factorio.com/

Items can be referenced using their in-game names because there's no risk of conflict and custom templates can be created and tailored per game. Guess which one of these displays more info:

    {{:Infobox:Tank}}

https://wiki.factorio.com/Tank

    {{Infobox video game
    | title = Factorio
    | image = Factorio cover.png
    | developer = Wube Software
    | publisher = Wube Software
    | platforms = {{cslist|[[Linux]]|[[macOS]]|[[Microsoft Windows|Windows]]|[[Nintendo Switch|Switch]]}}
    | released = {{ubl|'''Linux''', '''macOS''', '''Windows'''|14 August 2020|'''Switch'''|28 October 2022}}
    | genre = [[Construction and management simulation]], [[real-time strategy]]
    | modes = [[Single-player]], [[multiplayer]]
    | director = {{Unbulleted list|Michal Kovařík|Tomáš Kozelek|Albert Bertolín}}
    | producer = 
    | designer = Michal Kovařík
    | artist = {{Unbulleted list|Albert Bertolin|Václav Benč}}
    | composer = Daniel James Taylor<br>Petr Wajsar <small>(Space Age expansion)</small>
    }}

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorio

Keeping the information up-to-date is a big task for a fast-moving game. Imagine editing the card every time the dev changes the hp of the tank. The Factorio blog describes the benefits of this better than I can:

> Together with scripts, templates allow us to partially automate updating the wiki to the newest version, and alongside access to the game's source code, it is possible for me to update the wiki to a new version within a few minutes

The blog post has a lot of other interesting stuff in there as well:

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-233

A whole lot of work goes into making game wikis pleasant. I'm sure you could duplicate this all on Wikipedia as well, but that's a lot of additional work and communities already struggle to keep their Fandom wiki's up-to-date. The old Factorio wiki does not even have an article for the tank which has been in the game for years:

https://factorio.fandom.com/wiki/Combat

Out of date info is wrong info.

> Items can be referenced using their in-game names because there's no risk of conflict

Did you purposefully pick one of the items that has an in-game naming conflict and a disambiguation line?

Being focused to a single game means there's only a few conflicts, but it's not zero.

Good point! Not my intent, lol.

why?

I was going to say "it would be like documenting every chess opening move", but I looked it up and the article exists, so I guess I've just argued against myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_openings

In disambiguation issues alone, it would be a nightmare if wikipedia hosted niche-topic content within the same namespacing as everything else. What would be good is not wikipedia being more lax, it's WMF providing the same service that Miraheze does; and here, I think, is where the conflict of interest really gets in the way

Every single one of those chess openings has multiple books written about it. The most popular openings have hundreds of books about them.

Not to mention courses, articles, blog posts, discussion and youtube videos

If we're going by volume written about, minecraft isn't lacking any. Try to find more about red stone or mining techniques.

The main difference would be history, the split between books and online resources, and how the older generation sees it.

Circling back to my original point, wherever we draw the line on notability and inclusion vs exclusion, there are going to be people on either side unhappy about the location of the line.

It's probably easier for all parties to let the Minecraft community draw their own line on their own wiki(s) (which is exactly what happens).

"No solution will make everybody happy" is kinda of a poor argument though, as it will always be true whatever happens. In the end it comes down to who the service is for, and the younger generation probably doesn't see it as theirs.

I get the feeling Wikipedia will slowly become culturally irrelevant and end up in the same place as the encyclopedias, as an established and mostly frozen dataset that we'll want to keep running but won't look at 99% of the time

This is a list of notable chess moves though, not an exhaustive list of all possible chess moves

The same reason I would not fault a print encyclopedia publisher for not including video game strategy guides?

This is an ongoing debate between inclusionists and deletionists and it is far from settled even though the deletionists would have you believe the war is over.

I mean, no matter where you fall philosophically, Wikipedia does take resources to host, including storage costs, and they're always strapped for cash.

If they could be assured of never needing to reduce pages to not run out of money, I would have no logical objection to having a page for everything, but as someone who's donated quite a bit to them, they are most assuredly not in that position.

If the day comes that their hosting costs match or exceed their available funds, I'd much rather know that what is there is all the most important information, and not a glut of random pages that no one ever looks at.

Limited page count?

Essentially, yes. Space and scope/mission creep.

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