On 11/14/05, Brown, Darin Darin.Brown@enmu.edu wrote:
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.
Personally, what makes an article fancruft is treatment, not subject.
For me, a fancruft article is one that is useless to anyone who doesn't already know about the subject. It assumes context, assumes one is already a fan; it's treating Wikipedia as a fan site.
To correct that, the article needs to be worded with the non-fan in mind. It needs to explain why the subject is important. It needs to explain where the subject sits in relation to its context. It needs to explain context, or at least point to well-written articles on general terms and ideas. If the subject simply has too little that can be said about it to flesh out an article by itself like this, it should be subsumed into an article with a larger scope (of the [[Minor characters in X]] type).
IMO, articles on almost any subject can become fancruft when they are useless to the average intelligent non-expert.
-Matt