[WikiEN-l] "Exclusion" essay

[Elisabeth Bauer]

Steve Bennett wrote:

> That'd be cool. Let's think - what *is* the harm in boundless
> fancruft? There must be harm, or we would allow it. Perhaps it is
> simply that boundless fancruft strays too far from our mission, which
> is to produce an encyclopaedia that is not just a random collection of
> information.
>
> Someone help me out here - we all know that it's wrong to have 600
> pages describing every fight ever shown in any Pokémon episode. But
> why?

One hypothesis:
Allowing too much "fancruft" in Wikipedia creates an imbalance in the community
structure. There is a really large pool of 15 year old, computer savy kids (some
may be older) who get easily attracted to writing wikipedia articles about f.e.
star trek compared to a very small pool of for example experts on let's say
homer. The latter group won't be as easily drawn into writing for wikipedia than
the first. And they will be less and less willing to do so, if they find a
community dominated by 15 year old star trek fans.

greetings,
elian