>> "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.
> 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.