On 2007.12.10 18:54:18 -0500, joshua.zelinsky(a)yale.edu scribbled 1.6K characters:
Quoting gwern0(a)gmail.com:
On 2007.12.10 08:48:47 -0500, Michael Noda
<michael.noda(a)gmail.com>
scribbled 0.3K characters:
On Dec 10, 2007 8:32 AM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/071209.html
and later.
So much for Wikipe-tan. (And as for that ant thing ...)
This is a repeat appearance for us.
http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/070114.html
This, too, is funny because it's true.
No, it's not. It may be funny, but if it is funny, it is despite of
its falsity, and not because of its truth.
It wasn't true back in '03 or '04 when people first began really
pushing that joke - so the comic doesn't even have the virtue of
originality; that criticism is as old and stale as 'all your base are
belong to us'.
Give it a try; click through Special:Random and see how long it takes
to hit even a single fictional article, much less on a nerdy topic. I
had to go 26 pages before I finally landed on [[Core worlds]], and
then I went another 23 before I hit _[[Tramp Royale]]_ (although even
that is debate-able as it is merely *by* a science-fiction author,
and not itself actually a work of or about fiction.)
We must write more science fiction articles to make up for this. This
demonstrates a serious deficit.
Joking aside, some of this is likely due to the extensive mergers that have
occurred in a lot of these topics. For example, where we use to have separate
articles for almost every Stargate SG-1 character most are now part of a long
list. And many articles have also been transwikied or deleted outright.
Mm. I disagree; merging may have helped, but not to a great degree.
Suppose you merge the heck out of a area which is 'complete' and essentially
finished (all the necessary articles written and fleshed out); how much of a reduction are
you going to get? I don't think it'd be a terrible lot. A few factors maybe - an
order of magnitude at most.
And even if you generously presumed that this super-merging happened everywhere in the
wiki, you still wouldn't dilute it down from 10% of Wikipedia* way back when to its
current rough share of somewhere below 1/20th of Wikipedia**.
If growth continues, I suspect articles on fiction-related matters will continue to be
ever more dwarfed, especially since their already anemic growth is being mercilessly
combated as fancruft.
*or whatever it was. I *think* it was around 10% in '04/'04 - I know a number of
Wikipedians at that time had occasionally gone Special:Random surfing while recording the
percentages various subjects like 'fiction' occupied, but I can't seem to dig
any up right now.
**for all fiction-related subjects, mind you, and not just classically nerdy/geeky topics
like Star Trek and SF.
--
gwern