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?
Please don't put words in my mouth. While your hypothetical example is extreme, I would still find it wrong only for technical reasons - each fight description would be rather short and low on context, they'd do much better IMO as something like [[List of Pokémon battles]] (subdivided by season if one page is too large). It's not a random collection of information if we apply uniform standards of quality and structure to it.
I don't see how the "fancruft" we include is any more a "random collection of information" than the vast amounts of sportscruft, militarycruft, politiciancruft, and other sorts of subjectcruft that for some reason have an air of respectability about it that recent popular culture alone seems to lack. Who ever complains about how Wikipedia has articles for almost every ship that happened to participate in WWII, no matter how trivial its role? Or how there are articles about people whose sole claim to fame is an unspectacular one-year Senate position in Smallcounty, Iowa back in the 1820s?
I think the massive inclusiveness of Wikipedia is one of its best traits. Wikipedia is like a specialist encyclopedia that specializes in _everything_. When I see an article about an obscure topic I don't ask myself "should there be an article about this in a general encyclopedia?", I ask myself "should there be an article about this in an Encyclopedia of Stamp Collecting, or Encyclopedia of Star Trek, or Encyclopedia of 18th Century Railroading, or Encyclopedia of Agriculture, etc.?"