[Wikipedia-l] Middle Earth controversy

[Jimmy Wales]

Chuck Smith wrote:
> IMHO, I don't see why we can't have an article called
> Elrond or Bilbo Baggins, and have in the first line,
> "Bilbo Baggins was a character in [[Middle Earth]]..."
> and I think it's fine to have a fictional character as
> an encyclopedia entry.  After all, Wikipedia is not
> paper... I think it will turn out much differently
> than traditional encyclopedias and we'll have to
> accept some non-traditional ideas to do it.

I agree totally with this.

There's still a problem of namespace collisions, though.
A good example is [[USS Enterprise]], which is the name of many
real and fictional vessels.