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Comment by TFNA | Hacker News Reader

I was active in Wikipedia from 2002, and there was a lot of idealism back then among editors that it would be a "reference for all knowledge". Those wishing for a more constrained site eventually won the day, and they had good arguments like yours. But even today, you can find certain pop-culture lore, for example, covered in insane depth on Wikipedia; not everything was sent away to Fandom wikis as Wikipedia's policies evolved. So, it doesn't surprise me that people continue to ask, like here, why WP can't be more ambitious.

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The only reason that it wasn't more ambitious back then was because they wanted to be thought of as a grown-up encyclopedia and that meant aping Britannica. Britannica's dead, no one will remember it in 50 years, but now what was a capricious strategy is unquestionable dogma.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, the only one left, and it gets to define what an encyclopedia will be to everyone from this day forward. Excuses for my it must limit itself are inane.

You touch on it, but I think the reason the deletionists won out was that Wikia was Jimmy Wales' for-profit alternative, and Jimmy Wales was the Nexus of soft power on Wikipedia.

He didn't have to tell anyone "Get as much stuff out of Wikipedia as possible so I can make money off it", that was just going to happen institutionally as a result of his clout and conflict of interest. People would obey in advance, and people without enough radar to realize they should would lose out against those who did.

More ambitious is not necessarily aiming at covering with less discrimination.

I would find an encyclopedia with exactly zero article about any individual biography far more ambitious than one that cover only some, provided it would explain everything in term of structuralist perspective and consider names of actual people involved as relevant as the names of cells in a macrosized living form.

Or indeed the other way around, covering every single individual with an equal level of details, should it be done with first hand done investigation.

The middle ground that let enter only articles about people whose personal information passed the selection bias of other institutions is the lowest ambition of them all.

> you can find certain pop-culture lore, for example, covered in insane depth on Wikipedia; not everything was sent away to Fandom wikis

But if the pop culture lore has insane depth then it’s probably valuable enough to keep, yeah? If it has a few limited snippets and very few people writing about it as sources, then it’s a lot more questionable

Insanely deep lore is a dime a dozen these days. Every other fantasy book series has one. Every other video game has one. Not to mention fanfics, especially shared universe fanfics. Being deep lore should be a reason to delete, not to add a page.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for Mr. Tik-tok from Oz to have his own Wikipedia page. He's less notable than, say, Knight Artorias, and I don't think anyone in their right mind would argue Knight Artorias deserves one.

Then again, neither does the Great Grey Wolf Sif, yet here we are.

Tik-Tok was a main character in a live-action film in the 1980s and the title character of a stage musical 1910s, along with appearing in about a bajillion sequel books and cartoon adaptations by many different people.

A minor fun fact: Playing Tik-Tok on stage was one the early roles of James C. Morton, who appeared in a truly ridiculous number of comedy films from the 20s thorugh the 40s alongside the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, and others.

The argument can be made, though, that information about subjects (such as people) that are not notable is just data, not "knowledge".

What on earth is that argument?

I’m glad you’re struggling too. I was starting to wonder if I was having a stroke.

For instance, I'm in a room that has a "popcorn" textured ceiling. Suppose I take detailed pictures of it, and start making maps, giving names to the numerous bumps. Would that really be knowledge? There is no doubt that it would be data.

Of course it would be knowledge, including knowledge about how some human would process to map that kind of phenomenon, as well as his they name things. As soon as someone put some attention to some information, it becomes some kind of knowledge.

Useless hyper specific knowledge though. Worth preserving and sharing? Probably not.

If one consider to know in advance what will be useful or not, it's fair to categorize that as fortune telling.

Now there can be other relevant limitations, like physical constraints such as how much data storage is available, or social concerns like not divulging the physical address when some threats and hurts are very plausible consequences.

Just because something is completely pointless and uninteresting doesn't mean it's not knowledge. It's more or less just justified true belief (with some caveats)

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