A Simple Plea for Generalization
People are lazy: They don't like to take more effort than necessary to do what they want. While there are exceptions, this is generally true. People's laziness has helped result in the growth of giant search engines because they don't want to type in a URL when they can just search for it on Google. It has resulted in eBay and Amazon becoming the shopping malls of the internet, because most everything you could want can be found on those two sites. People's laziness has even spilled into real life, with the gigantic growth of Walmart eating up smaller businesses. People want to get to their relevant information, and get to it quickly.
I bring this point up now because it will start affecting us at some point in the future, and already has. Nintendo Wiki already has one wiki that plays to this rule of laziness: Mario Wiki. Their broad and expansive coverage makes them a one-stop shop for anything and everything relating to Mario and Mario subfranchises and even related franchises. Donkey Kong Wiki, Smash Wiki, and even the newer and still developing Yoshipedia all to some extent fall under the shadow that Mario Wiki casts. Does this mean that Mario Wiki is being overzealous in their coverage? No, on the contrary, they are being smart: They are being as broad and as expansive as possible to make them a one-stop shop, which will benefit their community more than if they were more specialized.
This isn't to say that specialized communities can't be successful, they just have to work harder at it. In a fight for eyeballs and editors, the wiki that stands out the most will be the one that most likely wins, and a wiki that has a bigger footprint has better odds of standing out more than one with a smaller footprint. Any online community needs to have the public not only be able to find them, but also want to go to them. Having specialized content means that you can tailor the information to be most useful to that audience, so they want to come back to you and not other sites. Still, that isn't to say that a generalist wiki can't have specialized content that people would find just as useful as if they want to the specialist one. We also can't ignore the facts that specialist wikis are less able to find editors to contribute to their growth simply because they are more specialized in their focus, whereas a more generalist wiki can easily find people to contribute because there are so many more areas to contribute to.
If NIWA is to best promote Nintendo, and to best promote its members, then there should be some form of encouragement for more generalized wikis to help draw attention to NIWA and its more specialized and smaller members. Expansive sites like Bulbapedia, Mario Wiki, and Zelda Wiki are invaluable assets to NIWA, and we should be promoting more sites like those to join. It may even be time to seriously start considering expanding into third party franchises so that we can do more for all of our members. More options for the public to find us means more chances for every wiki to grow and develop.
