[gravescale]

I'm also a pretty strong inclusionist at heart, but I can see also that if the living-person rules were relaxed, self-aggrandisement would proliferate like crazy. Even under the current, slightly deletionist, status-quo in a 10000 word article about some random academic (1), who is going to fact check all that spew and edit it down? The answer on that page is "no-one, for years"(2). And that's with lots of references, even if they are all his own papers and therefore not secondary sources.

Now what would the millions of articles about every TikTok influencer look like?

And then the same goes for products and companies. Every scam Kickstarter and onanistic startup would get a massive screed.

And then it all sits and rots forever once the academic retires, the influencer gets a real job, the Kickstarter vanishes and the startup folds, because no one else cares. But someone has to go around and fix the links and update templates and generally expend effort indefinitely.

On top of all that, while the article creator is still around, because the article is actually an advert, any attempt to edit it into a more encyclopaedic article is disproportionately likely to cause drama that burns up volunteer time and effort.

(1): One I saw recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Sornette

(2): Especially as many people actually good enough at collating and editing encyclopedic articles about subjects that aren't about their own media-based hobbies quickly decide Wikipedia isn't a very fun place to do that any more.

[lmm]

> Especially as many people actually good enough at collating and editing encyclopedic articles about subjects that aren't about their own media-based hobbies quickly decide Wikipedia isn't a very fun place to do that any more.

That cuts both ways. IMO Wikipedia has lost a lot of contributors by banning fun and disallowing the topics that people found interesting.

[gravescale]

My comment is more of a tangent along people/products but certainly I agree in that I don't see why the wider Wikimedia group of sites including things like Wikibooks needed to completely evict "fun" content, even if I personally don't think it should be in some language's Wikipedia itself.

Not least, you can crosslink between Wikimedia sites, so you could just link to [[fans:Digimon:Whatevermon]] and have the content "nearby" in digital terms without drawing it under the same notability and sourcing guidelines as an article on benzene, say.

Which as you say would keep the (often very, perhaps to a fault) keen contributor to the fandom in the Wikimedia tent and might encourage them to contribute to Wikipedia and related sites as well.

Then again, the auxiliary Wikimedia sites are pretty neglected by the parent foundation which has more important things on its mind much of the time, mostly fundraising and finding novel ways to spend that money.