Wikipedia:Historical Wikipedia pages/Talk/Gamefoolz

A discussion of an entry put up by someone about their own site, which broadened into Policy discussion/Articles on commercial enterprises.

Ok, I'll bite: why is this page being restored? Are we going to allow everybody to drop by and plug their web sites? --Stephen Gilbert

Stephen: Gamefoolz is for the bettering of humanity with it's humorousness. So this resource is --in the process of-- explains why you should have humour, and a site where to get it.
 * I have nothing against your site. See below for my argument. --Stephen Gilbert

The /Talk page would be the place to try your best to resolve the "should this page exist?" dispute amicably.

My view on this--I don't think it does any great harm to have a page devoted to Gamefoolz. We wouldn't want to have a page about every website that comes down the pike; Wikipedia Is Not A Web Directory (see what Wikipedia is not). But Gamefoolz is a big site, and we should be able to humor them even if some (or even most) of us think there's no point in including articles about large-but-not-famous websites.

Approximately the same thing would go for articles about companies. Eventually, when Wikipedia has a million articles, every-friggin-body is going to want to have articles about their businesses. Your Mom and Pop shop might not merit a mention even at that point (although, at that point, we might be set up to have an encyclopedia-style business directory; who knows?), but some mid-sized retailer, for example, probably would. If it made them happy, let 'em.

I don't feel strongly about this, by the way. I could easily be convinced otherwise. --Larry Sanger

I feel more strongly. Wikipedia Is Not A Web Directory, or a review forum, or a place for what is, essentially, content that belongs on the About page of a website. That's the point of having web space -- you can say whatever you want about your site, on your site. Wikipedia is not the place for meta-information on websites; that role is well served by web directories and the websites themselves.

I don't see that the corporations analogy is entirely appropriate. An encyclopedia article about a corporation is useful because people will not necessarily expect to get information about the corporation from the corporation itself; a corporation is not necessarily a place to get information. A website, on the other hand, is technically nothing but information; if it has something to say about itself, it can be said on the website, and people will more readily look to the website itself than to an encyclopedia article about the site.

Please, let's make this clear (perhaps in Policy, if it's not already). -- Bignose

But you concede, surely, that we should have articles about Yahoo, Excite, and Slashdot. So...? --LMS


 * I don't necessarily concede that, no. What is it we can say in an encyclopedia that isn't better said, and located, at the site itself?  I feel that anything approaching comprehensive coverage of the subject turns us into a Web directory; anything brief and pointer-like turns us into an ancillary web search.  What are the advantages of encyclopedia articles for Yahoo, Excite, Slashdot et al, that are not already met by the sites themselves?  -- Bignose


 * Tsk tsk, Larry, what an argument! :) Let's apply it to other topics:


 * People: We should have articles on Martin Luther King, Jr., Aristotle and Mozart, therefore we should also have one on my cousin Kal Thomas Gilbert, a garbage collector in Toronto who just moved into a new apartment.
 * Events: We should have articles on World War II, the Big Bang and the Protestant Reformation, therefore we should also have one on What Stephen Ate for Breakfast, March 12 1996
 * Er... I'll stop there. If you happen to think that the above arguments hold up, you should know that I don't actually have a cousin named Kal Thomas Gilbert]], and I doubt that I can remember what I ate on that particular day, so I can't write the articles. ;-) --Stephen Gilbert
 * (Ack! We don't have an article on the Protestant Reformation! Off to Requested Articles I go... --Stephen Gilbert

Here are my 2 cents-

1. Why are you discussing this here? Surely actual information about Gamefoolz would be much more relevant/informative than this argument.

2. They do seem to be a large website, but perhaps it needs just a little push to make it big. So what if we make 1 little entry about a webpage? If it does grow huge, then it would warrant the same attention as a Yahoo or a Google. I say, why not? What harm does it do? Don't give me crap about how "this isn't a directory" and such, give me reasons. - I think the question to be asked is "is this website particularly significant?". Yahoo is significant, due to its millions of users, its long history, it was one of the symbols of the dot.com boom, its declining share price... Similar things can be said about Excite. Slashdot is important in a particular subculture. I doubt (though I will admit that I don't actually know) Gamefoolz has anywhere near this significance, no matter how good its content may (or may not) be. In which case I wouldn't include it as an article. -- SJK

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, but it has the potential to be much bigger and much more detailed than any other encyclopedia. I say, let's not think small. Let anyone put an entry for anything they want. We should spend our energy not in discussing whether to remove such pages but instead on editing the pages to make them NPOV and to make their written style more "encyclopedia-like". --Eob


 * No argument on that point, certainly. Perhaps I'd look more kindly at such articles if they became, as you say, more NPOV, factual, and encyclopedic in content instead of an "About Gamefoolz" page.  If someone who knows the subject can massage it such, I'll be happier.  -- Bignose

- Who's going to edit them into shape? Is it anyone? It won't be me, or a lot of other people I would think. The original authors of this kind of page -- Gamefoolz.com is only one of a larger category -- never put in much effort, and what we get before editing is generally worse than nothing at all. Editing them into shape is tedious and less-than-rewarding; why should we reward half-assedry? -- Paul Drye

I think this is a borderline case. One issue is the potential for spam. I disagree with part of Bignose's argument, that information about websites is naturally best found at the website. I'd hardly expect Yahoo to have an NPOV article about the history of Yahoo, for example. But I do agree with SJK that the importance (or lack thereof) of the site matters. And I agree with Paul Drye that we ought not to reward half-assedry.

One truth about Wikipedia is that useless pages tend to not get much traffic. No one will link to them. If we ignore them, they quickly sink into unlinked obscurity. If Gamefoolz turns out to be more important than we currently realize, then links to it will naturally appear in other contexts.

Many of these same arguments could be had about an article about my grandmother. She's a very notable person in my life, and in the lives of people who knew her, but from the encyclopedic point of view, an article on Erma Leon Dudley is pretty pointless. If it's a lame article, so much the worse. (Especially since only a small handful of people in the world could even attempt to edit it with an eye towards accuracy.)

But again, the big issue here is spam. No one is likely to have a particular motive for writing a hagiography about their own grandmother. But websites and product manufacturers will have an increasing incentive over time to monitor the entires about them and work to edit them into their preferred mode. That's bound to happen someday, and we're bound to have to fight it.

It'll be interesting.

But for now, I'll come down with a vote on the side of letting this one slide. --Jimbo Wales - From the main entry:

An Explanation of the "purpose" of Gamefoolz
Gamefoolz aka gfoolz is (as stated before) a humorous page, humor is good for you as it provides one of the simplest forms of entertainment, if we (as in, the world in general) did not have humor, the world would be a boring place, so us friendly folks at Gamefoolz try to do our part of cheering you up and we hope you enjoy it while you still can.

If word gets around that Wikipedia is a great place to promote your website, we will be flooded with people throwing up similar articles, and leaving us to edit them in accordance with Wikipedia policy. We had a similar situation when someone tried to use Wikipedia to advertise a compression program called FAR. The pages were promptly removed, and I see no real difference here. Let's nip the problem of spam in the bud, instead of waiting until we have a huge mess to deal with. --Stephen Gilbert


 * Seconded. -- Bignose


 * Thirded. The writing in this article (and on their site) is semi-literate at best and utter gibberish at worst.  (Their site, by the bye, is utterly devoid of the humor they claim to be their raison d'&ecirc;tre.)  Kill this article a lot. --The Epopt

I agree with EOB, as long as it fits the "encyclopedia format" then why not? This is supposed to be a special encyclopedia thing, right? Then why limit it to stuff you can find in any normal encyclopedia?? That just doesn't make sense, and, to me, seems rather narrow-minded.


 * Tiresome and deeply naff though this site may be, I see no real problem with its inclusion. If you really must know what Gamefoolz is though, you probably aren't using Wikipedia... sjc

Two comments:

One - I think this discussion has moved beyond the specifics of Gamefoolz and has broadened into a deeper policy issue. It would be a good idea to devote a discussion to it on Wikipedia-L or on metawikipedia.

Two - I do not have any problem with people creating articles that discuss their commercial ventures. We do not want to attempt to prevent people doing it - it is a war we will lose. A much better alternative is to simply edit the articles of poeple who do so into something NPOV. A comment like "WebsiteX claims to be the number 1 basket-weaving website, though industry statistics strongly contradict this" or "the CEO of company X has recently been charged with insider trading" will probably make being actively featured at Wikipedia less desirable. Companies like to have control over their marketing, and at Wikipedia they will have no control whatsoever.

Having said the above - I will still happily delete articles which are clearly just advertising copy, as was the case with FAR. That article mentioned pricing and ordering details, so it had to go.

As regards this article: the current Gamefoolz article is not very interesting, is dreadfully written and frankly makes their organisation look rather amateurish, so it is actually not really to their benefit in any way. Numerous requests have already been made to improve the article, and sooner or later an editor will finally swoop down, remove all of the sub-literate parts and rewrite the 1-2 sentences which aren't too embarassing to read and actually have some content. This will not be an act of "information suppression" but merely an act of editorial cleansing, as could happen to any article on any topic that has not been improved, after multiple requests to that effect. - MMGB

The entire content of this talk page has been copied to


 * And on that page I made a suggestion that I'll repeat here: perhaps Google could provide a standard for inclusion: sites that score well (for sufficiently defined values of "well") can have pages, sites that don't, can't. For example, entering "link:http://www.gfoolz.com/" into Google gets "about 23" hits, while entering "link:http://www.slashdot.org/" into Google gets "about 38,300."  --the Epopt

I don't understand your argument here. If we cannot win a war of deletion against such articles, then how can we possibly win a war of NPOVing? Deletion takes just a few seconds, NPOVing takes much longer. --Zundark, 2001 Nov 28

Because it's not a war. C'mon, there's no Taliban here, just people with different conceptions of useful and interesting information.

BTW, what was wrong with revision 26, which included a little more information than the current version?

Wikipedia just got so depressingly conservative in one short month.

--TheCunctator


 * Revision 26 is dreadful, it is of such a low standard of writing that I (personally) found it embarassing. Hence I made some editorial decisions, which may or may not stand up to consensus. I deleted references to handles, as I personally deemed them irrelevant and subject to change over time. (Others may not). I also deleted comments like "joe bloggs decided to leave" and "jane doe writes the frippenfratz articles", as these are subject to change, and can easily be determined by visiting the actual website itself. I felt that a general description of the site, a few notes on its content and a summary of its history was more than adequate for an article like this. Whether my personal judgements about "what is and is not acceptable" will be upheld by the majority remains to be seen. But hey, that's how Wikipedia works. - MMGB

I think that they stunt the Gamefoolz pulled over on Internet humor prompted the latest delete. Check the revision history, and the talk page. --Stephen Gilbert