kosebamse@gmx.net wrote:
Alphax alphasigmax at gmail.com wrote at Tue Nov 15 12:15:00 UTC 2005:
What worries me is that with our growing popularity, we're going to have more experts arriving on our doorstep, trying to write articles on their specialist areas, and leave in disgust when some 2-bit moron votes "d, nn. cruft".
As far as I can say, that has always been a serious problem. It's not a matter of elitism. An expert who is used to discussing his views with well-informed people on an academic level will not enjoy the experience of having to defend basic and established knowledge of his field against schoolkids whose only expertise is with video games. I am offering no opinion on the desirability of it, but the latter probably form a very sizable fraction of our user base.
Once upon a time, I was a kid who read encyclopedias... although I find our video game articles interesting, it's the technical/Real Life details that interest me, not the plot-related "and here we see a detailed breakdown of all the weapons available, powerups, world details, monsters...". Things like "although it was brought out at the same time as (X), the (Y) feature made it more popular" *do*, because it's factual, not descriptive fiction.
Or something.
As for the "X in popular culture" plague, I recently (well, a few weeks ago) found one of these in one of the first article merges I did. I understand that the information has to go *somewhere*; it's just a matter of where... should every known appearance of railguns in ficiton appear in the "railgun" article, or be spread out between the articles on a dozen games, movies and books?