[WikiEN-l] "Fancruft"

[Brown, Darin]

> Message: 5
> Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 21:52:58 -0600
> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <4376B89A.1020000 at wikia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> 
> Justin Cormack wrote:
> > Ok, just had a chance to go through your list, and yes the World of
> > Warcraft
> > article is fancruft. But it has been edited by 6 people. If people  afre
> > going to
> > write this much it is hard to recommend merging.
> 
> And there's no obvious way that I can think of to persuade these people
> to do something more "serious" with their time.  They want to write
> about World of Warcraft, so that's what they'll write about.  We can
> hold them to NPOV and all that good stuff, and that'll be fine.
> 
> It'd be a fine thing if all the authors of waaaaaay too many Pokemon
> articles turned their attention to more "serious" endeavors, but there's
> no way to make that happen.
> 
> --Jimbo

I think it's a slippery slope trying to decide what's "fancruft". One
person's obscure hobby is another's love affair. Chacun a son gout. I'm not
into role-playing games myself, but the article does mention:

"World of Warcraft is the most popular MMORPG in the world"

Given this fact, and the fact that I have several friends who spend a lot of
time on MMORPG as a hobby, I think this is enough to discount the article as
just "fancruft". Arguably, there are more people who care about World of
Warcraft than about some of the more esoteric math articles I've written.

darin