[WikiEN-l] Of Pokemon and baseball

[Brown, Darin]

> Message: 9
> Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 11:20:59 -0600
> From: Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<bd4c411e0511130920l16ce374dk30a584fd7b43d67f at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> On 11/12/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Well, we can hope that when they grow up and go to college and
> eventually move into the real world, they will continue to edit
> Wikipedia, and hopefully not simply to keep the Pokemon articles up to
> date with the latest release.  Even if only a few percent of them move
> onto real articles, some good will come of it.
> 
> And if not, well, we'll have the best encyclopedia of anime and
> computer games in the world.  There's something to be said for that.
> [[Exploding sheep]] is a fascinating article, for example.
> 
> Kelly

Good lord, can we listen to ourselves?? Since when does any one person have
the moral authority over deciding what topics are "serious" or not? The
articles stand as they are, many are written pretty well, and that's that.
Prompting people that they should spend their time on more "serious"
endeavors seems to serve no practical purpose. Most likely, they might take
it as an insult and just decide to leave or become vandals. Myself, I've
read a few of the Pokemon articles, and having no previous knowledge or
interest in them really, found them really quite fascinating and
enlightening. Clearly, Pokemon is enormously popular, and any cartoon that
is in a position to advertise on a Boeing 747 is culturally relevant. The
same arguments leveled against Pokemon could easily be leveled against, say
[[baseball]]. After all, what purpose does it serve?? It's not really
"serious", and as friends have informed me, large segments of the population
find baseball as boring as dust and dry as a desert. Should we tell the
baseball people (which includes myself) to do more "serious" things?

darin