On 5/6/06, Ben McIlwain cydeweys@gmail.com wrote:
I really don't understand why people have so many problems with Pokémon articles. If you're not interested, you don't have to read it. I'm not interested in the thousands of articles about random small towns, but I'm not saying they should be deleted. There's a bar for notability that Pokémon presumably meets. Each individual Pokémon is certainly verifiable from any number of sources. I agree with the other Phil ... don't let the Pokémon piss you off, just ignore it and focus on writing articles on other stuff you think is more important.
This approach I don't agree with. Everytime we cite the fact that Wikipedia has 1,000,000 articles, we ascribe value to each of those articles. Every time we allow crud that we would be ashamed to speak of to remain in the article, we diminish the value of those articles.
For exactly the same reason I think it is very poor for us to have 900,000 (or more?) inactive user accounts. They don't harm us directly - but they do vastly misrepresent the actual state of the project.
Speaking for myself, the existence of Pokemon is not directly a problem. But Wikipedia would certainly be better off if somehow all the effort that was expended on Pokemon articles was somehow invested in other ways.
Steve