
Twenty years after Pokémon launched, its impact on Wikipedia remains - jaybosamiya
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/02/26/pokemon-wikipedia-impact/
======
minimaxir
It's worth nothing that the Pokemon Wikipedia, Bulbapedia, is _extremely
extensive_ , especially when it comes to obscure game mechanics:
[http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page](http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page)

The coolest page IMO is how Pokemon Capture works:
[http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Catch_rate](http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Catch_rate)

~~~
zanny
Which is partly why I kind of mourn the fall of Wikipedia. By having an
arbitrarily defined criterion of "meaningful" knowledge is spread across
hundreds of wikis rather than being in the singular copyleft originator.

Why couldn't the Pokemon Wikipedia articles be as extensive as the Bulbapedia
ones? There is demonstrable demand and interest in maintaining such extensive
information _as evidenced_ by the commitment of the contributors to Bulbapedia
to keep it so up to date and pristine.

If an article rots where nobody wants to maintain it or cannot write it with
sufficient information to justify it's existence that is a very different
situation to this. But that is not an arbitrary line of relevance someone
pushes upon everyone else. You could just have a minimum length and minimum
sources and be done with it.

~~~
tptacek
"Mourn the fall of Wikipedia"? Who is Wikipedia losing to? What was it before
that it isn't anymore?

I last spent significant time on WP in 2007, and "deletionism" was very much
the mainstream principle of the site back then.

Wikipedia has _extensive_ coverage of Pokemon; it covers Pokemon better than
it covers abstract algebra! What it doesn't do is cover every single aspect of
Pokemon in its own article.

The reason it does that is because there's a tradeoff in managing an
encyclopedia between reliability and expansiveness, and Wikipedia has tacked
towards reliability. If you're going to have a reliable encyclopedia, where
there's a pretty good chance that any sentence in the site is true, then
there's a negative externality to forests of related articles: each one of
them is an _independent_ entry point to the site from Google, and each will
attract its own edits, and all of those edits need to be policed to make sure
they aren't lies.

~~~
jessriedel
> If you're going to have a reliable encyclopedia, where there's a pretty good
> chance that any sentence in the site is true, then there's a negative
> externality to forests of related articles: each one of them is an
> independent entry point to the site from Google, and each will attract its
> own edits, and all of those edits need to be policed to make sure they
> aren't lies.

If this were a risk that we were correctly balancing against, you'd expect
there would be some notable base rate of unreliable articles causing readers
problems. But I never have this sort of problem. I'm never frustrated because
I found something unreliable on Wikipedia, because I can always be skeptical
of uncited information.

Elsewhere you asked for examples of damage done by the deletionists. So let me
flip it around on you. What are example articles right now that you think are
putting a large burden on the community that should be cut?

(As an aside, note the asymmetry: When too many hard-to-police articles are
kept, there's ample examples to discuss. But when too many niche articles are
deleted, I can't point to anything. I just say "huh, I guess my local taco
stand doesn't have an article". And I can never know if it's because no one
was interested to write one or because it wasn't notable enough to make the
cut...or because the person who was interested enough to write it new it
wouldn't make the cut.)

~~~
tptacek
I don't have a recent example to give you (though I could readily generate one
by dumping a list of the last week's AfD debates), but I can give you a point-
in-time example very easily: here's my old Wikipedia user page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tqbf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tqbf)

Skip down to "Articles I have tried to delete".

Several of the red-highlighted articles, which are now gone, were articles for
which I lost the AfD debate. Incidentally, just getting this small set of
articles deleted was a _galactic_ pain in the ass. People really want to have
Wikipedia articles about themselves and their companies.

I think you're wrong about the asymmetry, by the way. Just go to the AfD
debate logs: you'll get more now-deleted non-notable subjects than you can
possibly read in night, or several nights.

I leave you with this thought: it is possible that Wikipedia has more words of
coverage for "StankDawg" than it does for the chinese remainder theorem.

~~~
jessriedel
So I'm looking at the StankWag article, which was one of the articles you
tried to delete, and I'm 100% sure the internet is a better place for it
existing. What is the problem? It's well research and meticulously linked (no
doubt to defend it against deletionists like yourself). Who is being misled or
confused by bad info?

> People really want to have Wikipedia articles about themselves and their
> companies.

What is so bad about people wanting to have a wikipedia page filled with true
facts about themselves?

>I think you're wrong about the asymmetry, by the way. Just go to the AfD
debate logs: you'll get more now-deleted non-notable subjects than you can
possibly read in night, or several nights.

First, I have no doubt the info is recorded _somewhere_ , but it's not easily
accessible. But more importantly, as I hinted, the bigger problem is the
articles that were never written because folk know they would be deleted.

> I leave you with this thought: it is possible that Wikipedia has more words
> of coverage for "StankDawg" than it does for the chinese remainder theorem.

I don't get the connection. People who are prevented from editing StankDawg
won't decide to edit the chinese remainder theorem. Likewise, the fact that
reality TV is more popular than Shakespeare may be a sad indicator for the
world, but the solution isn't to ban reality TV.

Sorry for the psychoanalysis, but I'm listening to your tone and reading your
wiki page...and I think it just _irks_ you that these people get recognition.
But we don't need wikipedia to tell us who and what is important in the world.
It's just a source of information.

If I told you that there was magical AI software that now automatically
patrolled articles and got rid of wrong info reliably, would you suddenly
change your stance on deletionism?

~~~
tptacek
_Because they 're not true facts_! They're bullshit advertisements, exploiting
Wikipedia's cachet and, more importantly, their super high position on Google
SERPs. These are people abusing one of the most important resources on the
entire Internet for fucking _spam_.

~~~
jessriedel
What in the StankWag article is false?

------
xlayn
I have always wondered how the systems evolved.

Why Karen and her far cousin can't have their own Wikipedia pages?

It's not like it's going to be printed and more Pokemon is less about the
chemical elements, so what if half Wikipedia it's about Pokemon? or Star Wars?
if the pages are up to the standard there is no reason for not being included.

This reflects how the people related to this topics are just more
knowledgeable (about the topic) and willing to cooperate to the Wikipedia than
other groups.

~~~
Aissen
Yes, deletionnists are driving people to other venues. Wikia often claims to
run the world's biggest wiki once you aggregate all their communities. It's
sad that the Wikimedia foundation let the deletionnists destroy so much value
in Wikipedia without providing an alternative (like dedicated community
wikis).

~~~
chris_wot
I'm curious, what article was deleted that you can cite as an example of
destruction of knowledge?

 _edit:_ it's a serious question! Instead of down voting, just tell me. Or
even downvote, but at least tell me.

~~~
michaelwww
Deletionpedia is no longer kept up but I used to enjoy browsing it to see what
was deleted .

[http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php](http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php)

~~~
detaro
Some observations from looking through these:

* Huge amounts of various fictional universe lore, similar to the article

* quite a few bands

* some percentage of articles exists again, with better content

------
larrik
The headline makes it sound like Pokemon is newer than Wikipedia, but
Wikipedia is only 15 vs Pokemon's 20...

------
powera
As a proud deletionist (philosophically, not actively), I feel I need to
respond to a bunch of the comments here.

This claim that any fact, no matter how obscure and how specific, should be on
Wikipedia is maddening. Have you heard of the Library of Babel? If you index
everything, eventually you will have no knowledge at all, just madness.

And as for the claims that subsections or whatever will solve this problem, in
practice the way they do this _is through other wikis_. I don't see any reason
why the list of Ivysaur's attacks should be on Wikipedia. Just because it's
knowledge doesn't make it _useful_.

And in response to the question "what's the harm?", there's always a cost to
having data. If Wikipedia editors have to manage the Pokemon community, have
to prevent links to obscure Pokemon concepts from polluting the Abraham
Lincoln article, that's time they can't do something else.

------
dropdatabase
Hadoop could have been a good Pokémon name

~~~
geofft
[https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/](https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/)

~~~
CM30
Wasn't as bad as I thought it was, since I got all the questions right. Then
again, I know a decent amount about Pokemon and enough about big data that I
could say 'well, this doesn't sound like a Pokemon I've heard of, it must be
big data'.

------
sgentle
I've struggled for a long time with the deletionism/completionism divide. I
was initially strongly completionist for the reasons many others have said:
this could be the repository of all human knowledge, no matter how trivial,
and why would we give up that dream? To save on hard disk space?

But my viewpoint these days is that Wikipedia's size has the same kind of
problems that code size does. More code isn't bad in itself. After all, if
that code doesn't interact with your code, you can just ignore it. Something
like a zillion-line OO project with tightly defined interfaces gives you that
property.

However, there is an inevitable maintenance burden that comes with the size of
your project. If you want to change code conventions, or update some library
that is used throughout the codebase, or even just try to keep the project to
a certain standard, those actions are all difficult in proportion to the
number of lines of code.

In Wikipedia's case, they don't even have access to the same kinds of push-
around-huge-mountains-of-code tools that developers can use to manage this
problem. They have tools, sure, but a fundamental part of Wikipedia's model is
that it is unstructured (or at best semi-structured) data, just one big text
field, and so any automated transforms are necessarily limited.

So Wikipedia makes up for its fuzzy data model by just throwing people at the
problem. For it to be the sum of all human knowledge means it needs
proportionally many editors to maintain that knowledge. If there ever could be
enough editors to do that, and if there could be a structure that would allow
them to organise themselves, I'm not sure Wikipedia is it.

The problem is that Wikipedia can't regulate the number of volunteer editors
in the project. If the encyclopedia gets too big for the editors to manage,
large chunks of it will just atrophy and there'll be nothing they can do about
it. Worse still, editors will leave because they are unable to handle the
burden which only makes the problem worse.

So I'm not sure that completionism is actually feasible, at least not with the
structure as it is now. I still dream of that repository of all knowledge, no
matter how trivial, but I just don't know how we get there.

------
Peroni
Poké API is coming up to 54 million API calls - pokeapi.co

People still love Pokemon it seems

------
w84t1me
Psyduck... Psyduck...
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyduck](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyduck)

------
twhb
What is the (argued) benefit is to excluding information? “Often what is not
said is more important than what is said.” is vague and unsatisfying.

------
kevin_thibedeau
And yet Nimlang had to fight for over a year to get a page that could survive
the deletionistas.

