Zaku kai

Zaku Kai

If you'd like to know about the term "Zaku Kai" and its meaning in Gundam, you can Google it or look at MAHQ.net. I am a Gundam fan who appreciates Wikipedia's mission - I have on occasion found the trivia and pop-culture articles in Wikipedia rather interesting and even useful, but on reflection I've come to the conclusion that much of that stuff doesn't really belong here. I think it's very tempting for visitors to develop their own idea of what Wikipedia should and shouldn't contain (as I have, for that matter) - but what I believe is that Wikipedia's usefulness as an educational, informative resource is what should be emphasized. More specialized and particularly fictional data should be the domain of more specialized sites.

I've contributed here and there anonymously in the past, and decided to finally get a real account when a thread on mechatalk.net called for users to show their support for keeping a set of Gundam articles that were nominated for deletion. I've argued against keeping many of these articles on the grounds that they are irrelevant from any practical standpoint, and are already rather well-documented on other sites. I believe almost all Gundam articles on Wikipedia can (and, for the most part, should) be replaced with links to Gundam Wiki or MAHQ. Likewise for Star Wars, Star Trek, etc. I found the Star Wars lightsaber article very interesting and well-written, but how much of it really belongs in the encyclopedia? The real-world aspects, perhaps, like the props used during filming and how the effects were done, but even that is questionable. But the fiction about the components contained in the device? Or the pseudo-scientific explanations of how the blade could work as depicted? That stuff should be limited to Wookiepedia. Likewise I think Gundam information here should be more limited, more focused on the real-world aspects. I don't think there should be pages and pages about the plot of the show: but if reliable information about the production of the show were provided here, that I think would be quite interesting, and factual, and would set Wikipedia's Gundam information apart from all the fansites out there which mainly collect data from within the fiction itself.

While the deletion issue was one of the triggers for my creating this account, for now my focus will be on the discussions. I want to spread my perspective on this issue, and encourage people to move their Gundam documentation efforts to Gundam Wiki. I am not yet interested in doing things like nominating articles for deletion, not yet at least. I am still perfectly open to participating in the improvement of existing Gundam-related articles here, rather than fully pursuing a crusade to have them deleted. But all the while I want to encourage people not to over-proliferate this kind of data here. It's not what this place is for. People got to check their fan-egos at the door. Sure, Gundam is great stuff and it holds an indisputably significant place in the history of anime. That may merit an article, or a small family of articles, on the subject. But that doesn't mean that the Juagg needs its own article, or that this is the appropriate place for a detailed enumeration of all the different Zaku varieties, let alone their performance statistics (which, quite apart from being entirely fabricated in the first place, are inconsistent or impossible due to carelessness in how they were fabricated, and also subject to change at the whim of Sunrise.)