Its not that fascinating. What makes human opponents bad is their inability to see the board and to think ahead more than 1-2 moves. The stronger a player is the more moves he can think ahead. If you want to make stupid AI, then you need to limit its depth, and give it a percent chance of missing things like pins, forks, skewers, etc. You could try to program some kind of tunnel vision. Like the beginner player who doesn't notice the bishop hiding down in the corner when he hangs his queen out to dry. You might also consider giving the AI a chance to "forget" to look ahead in some situations. Lower level players often get wrapped up in what they perceive as a good combination and when the opposing player does something unexpected with a non-obvious purpose they often ignore it and plow ahead. The same thing could be down for lower level AI in RTS games. Most bad players given time will build everything. Their problem is they don't have an optimized build structure, defense/offense strategy etc. They also get distracted and sometimes focus on something and forget about things. What they don't do is just stop at building mid-tier units. Which is often what lower levels of AI does. They make clicking mistakes where they click a wrong unit, or forget to select a unit in a group or things like that. they get wrapped up in attack or defending and forget to keep building/research. AI doesn't usually do this.
These are the mistakes that AI needs to simulate. It shouldn't be hard. Just play a bunch of games against rank beginners and look at the kinds of mistakes they make then have the AI make similar mistakes. Anyone who wants to build a better AI for a game needs to spend some time observer real players of various levels and see what makes them that level. It wouldn't be perfect but using percentages to simulate real mistakes is much better than cheating AI or AI so ridiculously stupid your dead grandmother could beat it.
Actually its quite simple you need to test and advertise the following: 1)Minimum battery life under full load 2)Minimum battery life under full load after 1 year 3)Maximum battery life at idle 4)Maximum battery life at idle after 1 year 5)Maximum battery life watching a DVD (disc) 6)Maximum battery life watching a DVD (disc) after 1 year
Someone should create some kind of class action lawsuit on this based on some truth in advertising legislation. Something that would force companies to report these kinds of stats for their devices. My LG phone has about 2-3 days idle time. (LG-SH150A). However if I do any serious talking or game playing on it, I can kill it in a couple hours. I know now why the store tossed in a free external charger and extra battery.
What gets me in Korea is that they have a higher penetration of dSLR cameras here. Almost nobody has a point and shoot. On any given day you can see dozens or hundreds of these being carried around depending on where you go and how much you're traveling around. The thing is, they treat them like they cost $5. I can't count the amount of times I've seen people with these massive lenses attached to them (over 8 inches) and they're just gripping the body or having it slung over there shoulder with the lens flapping around. The amount of bent and destroyed mounts around here has to be some kind of record.
If you don't like the way your boss does things, and if its not criminal, go find a new job or make your own business. This really is a no-brainer. The harsh reality of the world is that unless you're an upper up, you're not going to change anything.
except there are far greater crimes than copyright infringement perpetrated on the internet everyday. Still following the OPs logic it should be gotten rid of.
speaking of anecdotal evidence..my first year out of college I went on 3 business trips. The first one was to sun soaked miami in the dead of Canadian winter. It was extended 5 days in which I got to go snorkeling in Key largo and find out that south beach is a non-advertised topless beach. My second business trip was also back to miami. my third trip was to albequerque where both my gps and my luggage got lost... yes.. I did get to take a wrong turn in albequerque..
I think it would be like their law against adultery. Used only when it suits someone. Like a movie star trying to save face or some situation like that.
having lived here for nearly a year Koreans seem to have a fairly relaxed attitude towards things like copyright and trademarks so I can't imagine this being much more than a law on paper that isn't really enforced.
I'm going to go out on a limb and bet the "service/product is really really really popular" clause isn't in the law. if the law didn't apply because there were alternatives, ebay's lawyers would have handled that no problem.
We used notes at my last company. it was garbage. It wasn't too bad at first but then some idiot got the idea that everything should be maintained in notes databases... we had a company phone list (for our local office) contained in a spreadsheet on a shared server. You could create a desktop link and find any phone number you wanted in about 8 seconds.. someone decided we should maintain a company wide database, including our parent company and unrelated subsidiaries. need to find a phone number for a local person? They stopped updating the spreadsheet because of that mandate.. you had to wait over 2 minutes for the database to open and the search was terrible, you could no longer search by some of the methods previously used.
There were several databases instituted just before I left. More of the same. Completely bloated and unusable if you had to do anything with any speed.
Its the norm in Korea. With exchange right now, ticket price is running around $4.50 USD. Assigned seating (you get to pick off a computer screen which shows already chosen seats) but if it is completely empty usually no one cares where you sit. Though unless you're going to the midnight or 2 am shows, there are usually enough people in the theatre that you should stick to your seat.
you can get a large popcorn and 2 drinks for another $4.50 USD.
Korea will be more or less the same. Koreans love taking pictures with their cell phones and if you've ever taken a trip on the Seoul Metro subway you'll notice something like 80%+ people watching TV on something. Not all of them are using their phones, some of them carry other portable devices and watch pre-recorded TV or movies. PSPs are far more popular here than I saw in Canada, but more for movie watching than gaming. Even the elderly are doing that (which is a direct contrast from the mass technology phobia the elderly seem to have in NA). I can't imagine the iphone being a big hit here. I believe its scheduled to come out here in 2 or 3 months.
Does it actually ship with that much toner? I doubt it.
This was a common misconception with Lexmark printers a few years ago. When people ran out of ink they saw the new cartridge cost $50. They just paid $50 for the printer....let's get a new printer! They were so clever. What they didn't realize was that the included cartridge only had like 1/3 of the ink in it that the retail cartridge had.
It is probably some lame attempt to save Canadian "culture" whatever the heck that is. Other than Hockey and stronger beer we're Americans with funnier hats in the winter.
The American cultural juggernaut is too strong and we're too closely tied to it to separate and save ourselves. No amount of forcing content providers to shovel out 20% guaranteed Canadian content will fix that. Especially when you can take half the American content, find a Canadian involved, run a short blurb before it saying "Jim Smith born in Ontario was a best boy on this film, Jim grew up with no thumbs, good job jim! No let's watch this latest American blockbuster"
Its not the only source, you also have plenty of blogs, forums and all that stuff, but those of course isn't accepted for stupid reasons.
Because anyone can go out and in 5 minutes fire one up to say whatever they want. Yes, that is a very stupid reason. Wikipedia is a popular destination. It has to be protected from abuse.
I never argued for total inclusion, I argued against crazy deletionism.
Didn't you quote wales about the sum of all human knowledge? Which is it?
Its information that everybody with a PSP can verify if he wants to. That stuff is even sold on Amazon.
But not something a random editor without a PSP can verify. We don't write articles just for people who own a psp and want to order a battery to test it to verify the content of an article. Should we say "Sure.. include that trivia about warcraft. Anyone who wants to buy a PC, a warcraft subscription, expansion packs, and spend 472 hours grinding can verify that fact"
I consider splits and forks and stuff a part of the problem, not the solution.
A split or fork in this case is nothing different than having more articles on a subject. You already agreed that we should have 500 page articles and split stuff off. What is the big difference if the content is linked from the main body of the article or in the external links? The link is still on the page. People can still get the info in the same amount of clicks.
Also the creators webpage might not exactly be very NPOV
and if that is the only source, how is wikipedia going to make it npov? if we write something that doesn't jive with what the only source available says, its unsourced. So we're back to editor opinion. You can't have it both way. The problem is that you don't seem to know what you want and how to go about getting it.
You are again trying to argue a strawmen again. Look for example at the pandora battery, kind of a 'big deal' in the PSP homebrew scene, yet Wikipedia currently doesn't mention it with a single word.
Am I? You're arguing for total inclusion. If you don't think that information belongs then you're admitting your argument has no basis. That there is in fact a line for inclusion and some things are on one side of it and others are on another side.
As yes there is no article on the pandora's battery because the only source is the battery itself. Nothing else. Wikipedia doesn't keep articles based entirely or mostly on primary sources. All that we can say about it would be little more than a stub. Its a battery that puts a psp into service mode. It can be made through a soft or hard mod. Wikipedia isn't a howto guide so those methods can't be overly detailed there. End of article. If you like I'll print out this comment and mail it to you so you can put it in a safe deposit box and keep it for perpetuity. I'll forward the article to your home address for anyone interested in learning about the battery. As I've also pointed out if you're worried about information being lost, start a wikia about it. Wikipedia isn't alone its part of the wikimedia foundation which provides free wikis on any subject. They'll last just as long as wikipedia and you can link them from the wikipedia article. Regardless of whether or not wikipedia is a paper encyclopedia the community decided there is a threshold of inclusion and some subjects or information on subjects doesn't meet that criteria. There are plenty of ways you can preserve that without it being on wikipedia. With the other wikis available, wikipedia will never open up to every thought ever thought. So you can either work with that or rant on slashdot. In the time you spent here you could have written a glorious article about pandora's battery on a brand spanking new PSP homebrew wiki.
Except as a primary source, what can it tell us? Product X exists, it has Y features and it was released on Z date. Big whoop. Wikipedia isn't a webdirectory or product comparison website or a webhost, which is all that could be done with that. If people started giving opinions on which piece of homebrew was better, etc then it would become original research. Its much easier to put a link to a main clearinghouse for homebrew and let people go there and read about the thousands of home brew apps to their hearts content. Knowing that RockingDude87 made a little application to blow up blocks with another colored block in 2004 for a school project doesn't give us any greater understanding of homebrew as a whole.
Except that isn't true. Dark Alex was featured in an article on the BBC. There are plenty of articles which have covered various facets of homebrew. They haven't covered them in the exhaustive detail that some people want, but that doesn't mean they haven't been covered to some degree. The article will end up based on what the reliable sources have published, not some exhaustive collection of every iteration of firmware ever released or dreamed up for some platform. Reuters, Washington Post, BBC, PCworld, EEtimes and ign have all run information about homebrew as examples. Primary sources aren't prohibited, unfortunately in the case of something like homebrew, there is no primary source for it since its not made by a single company. Once you establish notability with secondary sources you can use primary sources to flesh out some information, but if you have only 2 secondary sources and 57 citations pointing to primary sources the article is relying too much on primary sources.
Thats why you split things up into readable and manageable thunks.
Should we include one: "Editors Mad ramblings about subject X"?
Strawmen argument, I never mentioned huge amount of unsourced trivia. The point isn't to flood the articles with bad information, but leaving in good articles available and quite frequently that doesn't happen because an article isn't "notable enough" due to an completly arbitrary criteria.
That aside, most trivia is trivial to verify by just watching the movie, reading the book or playing the game or using the device, yet it is often near impossible to find a printed-on-paper source for it.
Yes, that is your point. If something isn't notable that means it hasn't received significant coverage in reliable third party sources. Without significant coverage in reliable third party sources there can't be an article about it because wikipedia doesn't keep articles which are based significantly on primary sources. Notability is not such a crazy and mystical idea like some people seem to treat it. As for trivia, I've never once read any of the trivia on wikipedia and felt that a single word of it has given me any greater understanding of the subject. Knowing that the Bugletown Cockknockers once name dropped Einstein in a song they played at Little Joe's Saloon in 1997 just does nothing to help me understand him further. Most of that trivia can only be sourced to primary sources as can most aspects of things like video games, novels, and other fiction. That is one of the reasons it isn't appropriate for there.
You are confusing Wikipedia with a paper encyclopedia. Beside "...given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." is a quote from Jimmy Wales and I think that guy should know a thing or two about Wikipedia, to bad that his wording isn't actually implemented in policy to stop the deletionist.
The sum is not necessarily the same as all the individual parts. And following your logic this thread should probably have its own article on wikipedia. How about the clothes I'm wearing today? I could take a picture and upload it. I could make an article about what I wear each and every day. If you want to talk about all human knowledge we have to talk about everything everyone has ever thought and that just isn't practical, So lines had to be drawn. Otherwise we'd be overwhelmed with articles about people's cats and the bowel movements they had the night before. The fact is if you can actually tie a couple of reliable sources to a subject you can get an article about it on wikipedia if they contain more than a couple words. Hell even if you don't you can get some things kept there if you get a handful of non-obvious friends to muddle a discussion in to no consensus.
It is not community who decides to delete a page or reverse an edit, it's an individual editor. The tendency of Wikipedia editors to take some article as their "own" and guard it jealously is infamous, and repeatedly referred in this very discussion.
And with that you've shown a fundamental misunderstanding of wikipedia. Only in the case of a speedy deletion does 1 person decide to delete something. Even in that case a regular editor first tags it as a concern as meeting a criterion for that and then an administrator reviews that request. The rest of the articles are put to a community discussion for deletion where over 5 days people debate if the article should stay. The only situation in which a single person might decide all by themselves to delete something is in the case of a blatant attack page or nonsense.
If Wikipedia wouldn't scare of the people actually writing and editing the articles it wouldn't have a problem with maintaining them.
No editor or even group has the ability on a volunteer basis to manage hundreds of thousands of word articles on a subject. It isn't practical.
If an article is of bad quality you mark it with one of those 'citation missing', 'npov' and whatever markers to give it a chance of improvement. If there are too many of those articles, Wikipedia is free to move them to an unstable/unreviewed/whatever branch. "Fixing" the problem of to many articles by deletion is doing far more harm then good, because it pissed of everyone that actually cared about the article.
Endlessly adding unsourced trivial and personal opinion to an article doesn't improve its quality. The only way to improve that is remove it.
Much more useful then a non-existent article. When you don't run out of paper there just isn't a reason to restrict the information you want to collect, one might argue about reorganizing stuff, about splitting articles of and such, but just deleting the information really doesn't accomplish anything useful.
Deletionist cause far more harm then vandals ever did
again you've confused an encyclopedia with a record of all human thought.
Wikipedia, not being a living being, is utterly unable to believe anything.
If you don't have the intellectual capacity to understand that I was talking about wikipedia as its community of editors then I can't wait for the rest of what you have to say..
Some deletionist scum, on the other hand, can only get it up by exercising petty power by deciding what article stays and what goes. It's the closest the ever get to wielding power over life and death (I hope). This is why I no longer contribute to Wikipedia and resist the impulse to correct any mistakes I notice: the reward is having my work deleted or reverted by some antisocial cretin who got kicked out from the Neo-Nazi party due to his excessive authoritarianism and has no other outlets for his resulting frustrations.
mmm insults against faceless people. We're really getting to it now. Obviously you had some pet page you created that was deleted for some reason. Things are not made better by endlessly adding to them. Do you think when a director shoots a movie that he includes every last take and scene he shot in the final product? No. In order to create a good body of written work things need to be taken out. This applies to articles and to the encyclopedia as a whole.
Today's featured article is about Thomas Cranmer, a archbishop of Canterbury in the early 1500's. The average person is unlikely to find that information at all useful for any purpose.
Nope, but the average person who might be interested in him (for whatever reason) will likely find only an adequate amount of information about him and not an endless list of everything he had for breakfast throughout his entire life.
Someone who isn't a historian, which is something 99.998% of the population of the world, doesn't remotely care about who led a subset of English church half a millennium ago.
Actually there may be a number of students in university classes who could care a great deal about him, christians may find themselves interested, etc. But that is besides the point. I was making a point about excessive detail in articles. You're trying to compare that to an article about a minor historical figure. Two very different things. An article on World of Warcraft is quite appropriate. It is a notable subject. Delving into minutia with raiding strategies, item guides, etc isn't.
By that argument most articles about physics and math could be deleted, because they are pretty much completly useless for somebody not working in that field.
I agree. I feel that some math and physics articles delve in to far too much detail on proofs, etc.
An encyclopedia is a concept that is based around the limitations of paper, Wikipedia isn't printed on paper and therefore should not follow the same restrictions.
We're not going to run out of paper no. But we're going to run out of the ability to manage articles that grow even more and more. I could easily see some articles become novel length piles of garbage if people were allowed to run free with them. the equivalent of hundreds of pages. Would you want to try and edit that? How useful would an article be if people could just endlessly add every piece of trivia or original thought they had about a subject to it. How useful is an article that contains "facts" that you can't click on a link to verify someone with a reasonable amount of authority has actually stated? It becomes little more than a fan page about a subject when it becomes an unending deluge of unsourced tidbits about a subject.
Except wikipedia doesn't believe it belongs on wikipedia, it is why it is taken down. If you want to start a wiki about various games and include all the infinite detail and trivia about it, you can. You can even get it linked in the external links. There is a certain subset of the population of editors who can't seem to tell the difference between an encyclopedia and everything every written, said, thought and just made up about a subject ever. That being said the 10,000 sub articles on pokemon needs to be nuked from orbit. Articles are meant to provide all the information the average person would find useful about a subject. Someone who is not a world of warcraft player, which is something 99.998% of the population of the world, doesn't remotely care what spells some paladin gets access to at level 27. It isn't remotely useful to their understanding of the subject. Articles are usually made by players, but not for players. Try being objective.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not that fascinating. What makes human opponents bad is their inability to see the board and to think ahead more than 1-2 moves. The stronger a player is the more moves he can think ahead. If you want to make stupid AI, then you need to limit its depth, and give it a percent chance of missing things like pins, forks, skewers, etc. You could try to program some kind of tunnel vision. Like the beginner player who doesn't notice the bishop hiding down in the corner when he hangs his queen out to dry. You might also consider giving the AI a chance to "forget" to look ahead in some situations. Lower level players often get wrapped up in what they perceive as a good combination and when the opposing player does something unexpected with a non-obvious purpose they often ignore it and plow ahead. The same thing could be down for lower level AI in RTS games. Most bad players given time will build everything. Their problem is they don't have an optimized build structure, defense/offense strategy etc. They also get distracted and sometimes focus on something and forget about things. What they don't do is just stop at building mid-tier units. Which is often what lower levels of AI does. They make clicking mistakes where they click a wrong unit, or forget to select a unit in a group or things like that. they get wrapped up in attack or defending and forget to keep building/research. AI doesn't usually do this.
These are the mistakes that AI needs to simulate. It shouldn't be hard. Just play a bunch of games against rank beginners and look at the kinds of mistakes they make then have the AI make similar mistakes. Anyone who wants to build a better AI for a game needs to spend some time observer real players of various levels and see what makes them that level. It wouldn't be perfect but using percentages to simulate real mistakes is much better than cheating AI or AI so ridiculously stupid your dead grandmother could beat it.
Actually its quite simple you need to test and advertise the following:
1)Minimum battery life under full load
2)Minimum battery life under full load after 1 year
3)Maximum battery life at idle
4)Maximum battery life at idle after 1 year
5)Maximum battery life watching a DVD (disc)
6)Maximum battery life watching a DVD (disc) after 1 year
Someone should create some kind of class action lawsuit on this based on some truth in advertising legislation. Something that would force companies to report these kinds of stats for their devices.
My LG phone has about 2-3 days idle time. (LG-SH150A). However if I do any serious talking or game playing on it, I can kill it in a couple hours. I know now why the store tossed in a free external charger and extra battery.
What gets me in Korea is that they have a higher penetration of dSLR cameras here. Almost nobody has a point and shoot. On any given day you can see dozens or hundreds of these being carried around depending on where you go and how much you're traveling around. The thing is, they treat them like they cost $5. I can't count the amount of times I've seen people with these massive lenses attached to them (over 8 inches) and they're just gripping the body or having it slung over there shoulder with the lens flapping around. The amount of bent and destroyed mounts around here has to be some kind of record.
If you don't like the way your boss does things, and if its not criminal, go find a new job or make your own business. This really is a no-brainer. The harsh reality of the world is that unless you're an upper up, you're not going to change anything.
Grow up child. No one is interested in your games.
except there are far greater crimes than copyright infringement perpetrated on the internet everyday. Still following the OPs logic it should be gotten rid of.
speaking of anecdotal evidence..my first year out of college I went on 3 business trips. The first one was to sun soaked miami in the dead of Canadian winter. It was extended 5 days in which I got to go snorkeling in Key largo and find out that south beach is a non-advertised topless beach. My second business trip was also back to miami.
my third trip was to albequerque where both my gps and my luggage got lost... yes.. I did get to take a wrong turn in albequerque..
I think it would be like their law against adultery. Used only when it suits someone. Like a movie star trying to save face or some situation like that.
having lived here for nearly a year Koreans seem to have a fairly relaxed attitude towards things like copyright and trademarks so I can't imagine this being much more than a law on paper that isn't really enforced.
I'm going to go out on a limb and bet the "service/product is really really really popular" clause isn't in the law. if the law didn't apply because there were alternatives, ebay's lawyers would have handled that no problem.
We used notes at my last company. it was garbage. It wasn't too bad at first but then some idiot got the idea that everything should be maintained in notes databases...
we had a company phone list (for our local office) contained in a spreadsheet on a shared server. You could create a desktop link and find any phone number you wanted in about 8 seconds..
someone decided we should maintain a company wide database, including our parent company and unrelated subsidiaries.
need to find a phone number for a local person? They stopped updating the spreadsheet because of that mandate.. you had to wait over 2 minutes for the database to open and the search was terrible, you could no longer search by some of the methods previously used.
There were several databases instituted just before I left. More of the same. Completely bloated and unusable if you had to do anything with any speed.
Its the norm in Korea. With exchange right now, ticket price is running around $4.50 USD. Assigned seating (you get to pick off a computer screen which shows already chosen seats) but if it is completely empty usually no one cares where you sit. Though unless you're going to the midnight or 2 am shows, there are usually enough people in the theatre that you should stick to your seat.
you can get a large popcorn and 2 drinks for another $4.50 USD.
Korea will be more or less the same. Koreans love taking pictures with their cell phones and if you've ever taken a trip on the Seoul Metro subway you'll notice something like 80%+ people watching TV on something. Not all of them are using their phones, some of them carry other portable devices and watch pre-recorded TV or movies. PSPs are far more popular here than I saw in Canada, but more for movie watching than gaming. Even the elderly are doing that (which is a direct contrast from the mass technology phobia the elderly seem to have in NA). I can't imagine the iphone being a big hit here. I believe its scheduled to come out here in 2 or 3 months.
Does it actually ship with that much toner? I doubt it.
This was a common misconception with Lexmark printers a few years ago. When people ran out of ink they saw the new cartridge cost $50. They just paid $50 for the printer....let's get a new printer! They were so clever. What they didn't realize was that the included cartridge only had like 1/3 of the ink in it that the retail cartridge had.
It is probably some lame attempt to save Canadian "culture" whatever the heck that is. Other than Hockey and stronger beer we're Americans with funnier hats in the winter.
The American cultural juggernaut is too strong and we're too closely tied to it to separate and save ourselves. No amount of forcing content providers to shovel out 20% guaranteed Canadian content will fix that. Especially when you can take half the American content, find a Canadian involved, run a short blurb before it saying "Jim Smith born in Ontario was a best boy on this film, Jim grew up with no thumbs, good job jim! No let's watch this latest American blockbuster"
Because anyone can go out and in 5 minutes fire one up to say whatever they want. Yes, that is a very stupid reason. Wikipedia is a popular destination. It has to be protected from abuse.
Didn't you quote wales about the sum of all human knowledge? Which is it?
But not something a random editor without a PSP can verify. We don't write articles just for people who own a psp and want to order a battery to test it to verify the content of an article. Should we say "Sure.. include that trivia about warcraft. Anyone who wants to buy a PC, a warcraft subscription, expansion packs, and spend 472 hours grinding can verify that fact"
A split or fork in this case is nothing different than having more articles on a subject. You already agreed that we should have 500 page articles and split stuff off. What is the big difference if the content is linked from the main body of the article or in the external links? The link is still on the page. People can still get the info in the same amount of clicks.
and if that is the only source, how is wikipedia going to make it npov? if we write something that doesn't jive with what the only source available says, its unsourced.
So we're back to editor opinion. You can't have it both way.
The problem is that you don't seem to know what you want and how to go about getting it.
Am I? You're arguing for total inclusion. If you don't think that information belongs then you're admitting your argument has no basis. That there is in fact a line for inclusion and some things are on one side of it and others are on another side.
As yes there is no article on the pandora's battery because the only source is the battery itself. Nothing else. Wikipedia doesn't keep articles based entirely or mostly on primary sources. All that we can say about it would be little more than a stub. Its a battery that puts a psp into service mode. It can be made through a soft or hard mod. Wikipedia isn't a howto guide so those methods can't be overly detailed there. End of article. If you like I'll print out this comment and mail it to you so you can put it in a safe deposit box and keep it for perpetuity. I'll forward the article to your home address for anyone interested in learning about the battery. As I've also pointed out if you're worried about information being lost, start a wikia about it. Wikipedia isn't alone its part of the wikimedia foundation which provides free wikis on any subject. They'll last just as long as wikipedia and you can link them from the wikipedia article. Regardless of whether or not wikipedia is a paper encyclopedia the community decided there is a threshold of inclusion and some subjects or information on subjects doesn't meet that criteria. There are plenty of ways you can preserve that without it being on wikipedia. With the other wikis available, wikipedia will never open up to every thought ever thought. So you can either work with that or rant on slashdot. In the time you spent here you could have written a glorious article about pandora's battery on a brand spanking new PSP homebrew wiki.
Except as a primary source, what can it tell us? Product X exists, it has Y features and it was released on Z date. Big whoop. Wikipedia isn't a webdirectory or product comparison website or a webhost, which is all that could be done with that. If people started giving opinions on which piece of homebrew was better, etc then it would become original research. Its much easier to put a link to a main clearinghouse for homebrew and let people go there and read about the thousands of home brew apps to their hearts content. Knowing that RockingDude87 made a little application to blow up blocks with another colored block in 2004 for a school project doesn't give us any greater understanding of homebrew as a whole.
Except that isn't true. Dark Alex was featured in an article on the BBC. There are plenty of articles which have covered various facets of homebrew. They haven't covered them in the exhaustive detail that some people want, but that doesn't mean they haven't been covered to some degree. The article will end up based on what the reliable sources have published, not some exhaustive collection of every iteration of firmware ever released or dreamed up for some platform. Reuters, Washington Post, BBC, PCworld, EEtimes and ign have all run information about homebrew as examples. Primary sources aren't prohibited, unfortunately in the case of something like homebrew, there is no primary source for it since its not made by a single company. Once you establish notability with secondary sources you can use primary sources to flesh out some information, but if you have only 2 secondary sources and 57 citations pointing to primary sources the article is relying too much on primary sources.
Should we include one: "Editors Mad ramblings about subject X"?
Yes, that is your point. If something isn't notable that means it hasn't received significant coverage in reliable third party sources. Without significant coverage in reliable third party sources there can't be an article about it because wikipedia doesn't keep articles which are based significantly on primary sources. Notability is not such a crazy and mystical idea like some people seem to treat it. As for trivia, I've never once read any of the trivia on wikipedia and felt that a single word of it has given me any greater understanding of the subject. Knowing that the Bugletown Cockknockers once name dropped Einstein in a song they played at Little Joe's Saloon in 1997 just does nothing to help me understand him further. Most of that trivia can only be sourced to primary sources as can most aspects of things like video games, novels, and other fiction. That is one of the reasons it isn't appropriate for there.
The sum is not necessarily the same as all the individual parts. And following your logic this thread should probably have its own article on wikipedia. How about the clothes I'm wearing today? I could take a picture and upload it. I could make an article about what I wear each and every day. If you want to talk about all human knowledge we have to talk about everything everyone has ever thought and that just isn't practical, So lines had to be drawn. Otherwise we'd be overwhelmed with articles about people's cats and the bowel movements they had the night before. The fact is if you can actually tie a couple of reliable sources to a subject you can get an article about it on wikipedia if they contain more than a couple words. Hell even if you don't you can get some things kept there if you get a handful of non-obvious friends to muddle a discussion in to no consensus.
And with that you've shown a fundamental misunderstanding of wikipedia. Only in the case of a speedy deletion does 1 person decide to delete something. Even in that case a regular editor first tags it as a concern as meeting a criterion for that and then an administrator reviews that request. The rest of the articles are put to a community discussion for deletion where over 5 days people debate if the article should stay. The only situation in which a single person might decide all by themselves to delete something is in the case of a blatant attack page or nonsense.
No editor or even group has the ability on a volunteer basis to manage hundreds of thousands of word articles on a subject. It isn't practical.
Endlessly adding unsourced trivial and personal opinion to an article doesn't improve its quality. The only way to improve that is remove it.
again you've confused an encyclopedia with a record of all human thought.
If you don't have the intellectual capacity to understand that I was talking about wikipedia as its community of editors then I can't wait for the rest of what you have to say..
mmm insults against faceless people. We're really getting to it now. Obviously you had some pet page you created that was deleted for some reason. Things are not made better by endlessly adding to them. Do you think when a director shoots a movie that he includes every last take and scene he shot in the final product? No. In order to create a good body of written work things need to be taken out. This applies to articles and to the encyclopedia as a whole.
Nope, but the average person who might be interested in him (for whatever reason) will likely find only an adequate amount of information about him and not an endless list of everything he had for breakfast throughout his entire life.
Actually there may be a number of students in university classes who could care a great deal about him, christians may find themselves interested, etc. But that is besides the point. I was making a point about excessive detail in articles. You're trying to compare that to an article about a minor historical figure. Two very different things. An article on World of Warcraft is quite appropriate. It is a notable subject. Delving into minutia with raiding strategies, item guides, etc isn't.
I agree. I feel that some math and physics articles delve in to far too much detail on proofs, etc.
We're not going to run out of paper no. But we're going to run out of the ability to manage articles that grow even more and more. I could easily see some articles become novel length piles of garbage if people were allowed to run free with them. the equivalent of hundreds of pages. Would you want to try and edit that? How useful would an article be if people could just endlessly add every piece of trivia or original thought they had about a subject to it. How useful is an article that contains "facts" that you can't click on a link to verify someone with a reasonable amount of authority has actually stated? It becomes little more than a fan page about a subject when it becomes an unending deluge of unsourced tidbits about a subject.
Except wikipedia doesn't believe it belongs on wikipedia, it is why it is taken down. If you want to start a wiki about various games and include all the infinite detail and trivia about it, you can. You can even get it linked in the external links. There is a certain subset of the population of editors who can't seem to tell the difference between an encyclopedia and everything every written, said, thought and just made up about a subject ever. That being said the 10,000 sub articles on pokemon needs to be nuked from orbit. Articles are meant to provide all the information the average person would find useful about a subject. Someone who is not a world of warcraft player, which is something 99.998% of the population of the world, doesn't remotely care what spells some paladin gets access to at level 27. It isn't remotely useful to their understanding of the subject. Articles are usually made by players, but not for players. Try being objective.