It's worth nothing that the Pokemon Wikipedia, Bulbapedia, is <i>extremely extensive</i>, especially when it comes to obscure game mechanics: <a href="http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page</a><p>The coolest page IMO is how Pokemon Capture works: <a href="http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Catch_rate" rel="nofollow">http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Catch_rate</a>
I have always wondered how the systems evolved.<p>Why Karen and her far cousin can't have their own Wikipedia pages?<p>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.<p>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.
As a proud deletionist (philosophically, not actively), I feel I need to respond to a bunch of the comments here.<p>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.<p>And as for the claims that subsections or whatever will solve this problem, in practice the way they do this <i>is through other wikis</i>. 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 <i>useful</i>.<p>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.
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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.