On 2007.12.10 18:54:18 -0500, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu scribbled 1.6K characters:
Quoting gwern0@gmail.com:
On 2007.12.10 08:48:47 -0500, Michael Noda michael.noda@gmail.com scribbled 0.3K characters:
On Dec 10, 2007 8:32 AM, David Gerard dgerard@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