Encyc:Hobbies

Encyc:Hobbies (policy essay)

Summary: Encyc should support hobbyists.

History

One of the greatest things about the early internet was the immense diversity of information available about hobbies. Perhaps this was a function of the time. The 70s-90s were a golden age for hobbyists. There was an explosion in technology and infrastructure to support activities like sports (e.g. raquetball, tennis, skiing, surfing, skateboarding, bicycling), model trains, RC cars, model boats, CB radio, amateur radio, new musical instruments, car and truck modifications, hiking and survivalism, stamp and coin collecting, video games, baseball cards, fiction writing, photography, etc. The list is endless.

Naturally, hobbyists would assemble at conventions to talk about and buy and sell gear. Magazines shared all the latest tips, info and reviews. In the 90s-2000s, many of these fans would put what they knew on the web, in the form of static HTML pages or sometimes web forums, and even early Wikipedia.

Then it somehow all went wrong. A debate at Wikipedia erupted between "inclusionism" vs. "deletionism". The deletionists made many good points. Wikipedia had a lot of content that was unsourced or poorly sourced. Some living people were hurt by defamatory content posted to Wikipedia. Stringent content policies, like Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Reliable sources, and Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons were adopted.

The problem was that these policies were applied across the board by literal-minded zealots incapable of seeing any distinction between an article about Pokemon cards vs. a biography of a real human being. Huge swathes of content, representing likely hundreds of thousands of hours of work, were deleted or pared down and merged into "list" articles where they would be less noticed and harder to access. The deletionists claimed that a high quality encyclopedia should not have poorly sourced fan-generated articles of varying quality.

Issues

We will never know if left intact, those amateurish articles would have evolved into something more polished. It's quite possible, that given enough time, they would have improved. For an example of what this might look like, you can check topics that have had enough fan support to survive, like the excellent articles about J.R.R. Tolkien fiction in Wikipedia:Category:Middle-earth characters.

Those articles were hurting nobody, unless you accept the abstract argument that somehow they hurt the reputation of Wikipedia or were "hard to maintain". From the 2000s until today, Wikipedia has been a top 10 website.

Meanwhile Wikipedia and Google developed an unhealthy relationship. In the 2000s, Google loved having relevant content to display, especially about the "long tail of search", those obscure topics that were welcome on Wikipedia the first few years. However, this immediately starved traditional web 1.0 sites of traffic. Adding insult to injury, much of what hobbyists had painstakingly put together was simply copy and pasted onto Wikipedia, often with insufficient attribution.

Conflict of Interest

Another event had a decisive effect. Jimmy Wales left Wikipedia to found Wikia, a for-profit company which later renamed itself Fandom. Capitalizing on brand confusion, Wales and others promoted Wikia as a place for fans to post content about their favorite pursuits. By inference, it was implied that Wikipedia was no longer the correct or proper place to write about your favorite hobbies. You, the fan, were to use Wikia and leave Wikipedia for the users interested in science, history, politics, and other more traditional encyclopedia topics.

Outcome

This devastated the hobbyist community. Many articles were simply deleted, and those that weren't were merged. Some topics were spared, particularly if they were popular among Wikipedia's administrator class, which mostly consisted of white, male, western, Gen X and Millenials, who spent a lot of time using computers.

Alternatives

Content moved to Wikia quickly became useless because the corporation needed to monetize the site, and they messed with the interface and added large ads and popups which make it nearly unusable. Some users took their content off Wikia, but Google buried it.

Some found a home on Reddit, where the obscure topics are still welcome, but it reads like Reddit.

Several attempts to fork Wikipedia or start alternative sites were attempted. Many of these were low effort garbage. This ruined it for the relatively few good actors, and it became very difficult for wikis to be indexed by Google.

The Future

At Encyc, we can do this. We have the benefit of hindsight, and we are more enlightened. We can see the difference between an unsourced article about a Tamiya Hornet vs. a defamatory hit piece like Wikipedia:John Seigenthaler.

Google is always changing its algorithm, and AI is changing the game. Many people are no longer using search, and those that do aren't mindlessly clicking through to Wikipedia.

There is no good reason that a free online general wiki encylopedia can't support specialized fan communities. Do you disagree? Post here.