Adrian wrote:
[...] Take a look at the SA link, in case you don't know it yet. It's an old story, but the examples of article pairs, although many of them are chosen tongue-in-cheek, speak for themselves.
This is funny and/or embarrassing depending on your outlook, but is it a problem? I agree that the serious articles should be better, but in these comparisons there seems to be an implicit theory that the fan topics are somehow sucking the life out of the serious ones.
But really, do we want somebody obsessed about [[Optimus Prime]] to spend a lot of time on [[Prime number]]? And even if we wanted them to, would they do it and do it well? I don't think so.
From what I've seen, the fan stuff is not a particularly big maintenance burden. Maybe I've missed it, but I don't see a lot of vandalism, a lot of dispute resolution, or a lot of AN/I requests over the stuff. So it seems like the net cost of keeping it is relatively small. And I see two big benefits that come from it.
First is that the more editors we have involved in Wikipedia, the better. People identify with things they've contributed to. That gives us all sorts of positive effects, including less vandalism, more donations, more person-to-person promotion, and more public support.
And second, people look this stuff up. Your average Joe's impression of the value of Wikipedia is going to depend directly on how frequently and how well we answer the questions they are wondering about. Maybe they *should* be wondering about tau neutrinos, but a lot of people are going to start out wondering about Scrappy Doo, and will be delighted to learn that the character was based on the chickenhawk in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons. Maybe that's not as good as them learning about neutrinos, but I think each little success like that is still a win for Wikipedia.
William