Message: 5 Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2005 21:52:58 -0600 From: Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation... To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Message-ID: 4376B89A.1020000@wikia.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Justin Cormack wrote:
Ok, just had a chance to go through your list, and yes the World of Warcraft article is fancruft. But it has been edited by 6 people. If people afre going to write this much it is hard to recommend merging.
And there's no obvious way that I can think of to persuade these people to do something more "serious" with their time. They want to write about World of Warcraft, so that's what they'll write about. We can hold them to NPOV and all that good stuff, and that'll be fine.
It'd be a fine thing if all the authors of waaaaaay too many Pokemon articles turned their attention to more "serious" endeavors, but there's no way to make that happen.
--Jimbo
I think it's a slippery slope trying to decide what's "fancruft". One person's obscure hobby is another's love affair. Chacun a son gout. I'm not into role-playing games myself, but the article does mention:
"World of Warcraft is the most popular MMORPG in the world"
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.
darin
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