>it may be hard to find information about Karen that's up to the standards of Wikipedia sources
that's a fair reason but I suspect your second point is more relevant
>and it might be more practical from an information-organization standpoint to have a mention of Karen combined into a page about the series in general
quoting report
"The world probably doesn’t need zillions of explanatory articles about the Japanese video game franchise Pokémon."
why? if people are willing to devote their time to the task I don't see a reason why their work shouldn't be preserved.
On the other side I do also understand the reason behind it
"keep a standard"
but for the same reason you can't get technical on technical topics and we have the simple English entries.
>> "The world probably doesn’t need zillions of explanatory articles about the Japanese video game franchise Pokémon."
> why? if people are willing to devote their time to the task I don't see a reason why their work shouldn't be preserved.
These sentiments don't need to be at odds with each other. Instead of zillions of (very small) explanatory articles of a half-paragraph each, we can have a few dozen (large) ones with the same informational content and much less overhead in how they're organized and maintained, especially when they all share the same information sources, while big names like Pikachu with unique significance can get their own articles.
I'm not sure I actually agree with your sentiment here. The way I see it, having a bunch of small articles is both more useful for people who want to find specific information, as well as relatively easy to maintain. (though organizing it might be harder, that much could be true) For example, since everyone seems to want to talk about a character named Karen, if I were a casual user (I am) that just wants to find out who this Karen character is, I would find it so much easier to find a "Karen (Pokemon)" page on Wikipedia than finding a huge article about characters and needing to go through and find the specific one I want to know about. It would even be easier to edit, as then I could go find that specific page, and deal with the (relatively) small amount of text/code instead of fighting through many paragraphs for a single small edit. I feel like it's a similar principle to code, where you want to deal with smaller code files rather than a single, ten thousand line file.
Of course, that's just my opinion, take it for what it is :)
At least the Pokemon I tried have redirects set up, jumping to the appropriate part of the longer page. What I'd like to see if they consistently linked to more specific, outside wikis for further information (maybe that's common already, don't have an overview)
Yeah, I believe the point you're missing is that topics like Karen also get deleted from the large topic pages. If the have their own topic, they are deleted, if they're included in a larger summary page, they are edited out. Deletionists are excluding the information from Wikipedia, not merely allowing for reformat.
I guess they just don't want to be seen as competing with all the other wikis for specific franchises. Bulbapedia exists for Pokemon stuff, Mario Wiki for Mario stuff, Wookiepedia for Star Wars, Memory Alpha for Star Trek...
They want to be seen as a place for knowledge about a variety of topics, not one that's heavily focused on a single subject.
Wikipedia and the Pokémon wars predate these wikis. Note that many of these are hosted with Wikia (originally named Wikicities), which was Jimmy Wales's next venture after founding Wikipedia (he's moved on to The People's Operator). Wikicities was launched sometime 2005ish, but Pokémon articles and no-name garage bands were already a hot issue at the time.
thats a great point, look at the Karen page on bulbapedia: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Karen,
there are lists of pokemons she uses on every game she appears, their movesets, quotes from her, artwork, appearences on the manga and trivia.
I personally lean toward inclusionism but I don't really think any of this information fits wikipedia.
that's a fair reason but I suspect your second point is more relevant
>and it might be more practical from an information-organization standpoint to have a mention of Karen combined into a page about the series in general
quoting report
"The world probably doesn’t need zillions of explanatory articles about the Japanese video game franchise Pokémon."
why? if people are willing to devote their time to the task I don't see a reason why their work shouldn't be preserved.
On the other side I do also understand the reason behind it
"keep a standard"
but for the same reason you can't get technical on technical topics and we have the simple English entries.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen
Maybe just as we have the simple entries we should also have anime and sci-fi.