Anime Vice, Otaku Sites Competing for Otaku Attention, etc.
December 9, 2008 • Commentary, Editorial • 5 Comments
Anime Vice launched on what, Friday? Despite the fact that I wasn’t initially planning to join at all, I’ve spent more than a little time on the site since then doing all manner of mostly useless things. Choice is supposed to be a good thing, I know, but I’ve always disliked that there were so many options when it came to anime encyclopedia and social networking sites. Why do we need so many? Why not just put forth the collective effort to improve what’s already there? ANN and Wikipedia are basically my first choices when looking anything up, and I think it’s hard to imagine that any other site is going to catch up to their repertoire of information any time soon.
I’m finding myself compulsively filling in the missing pieces that are all over AnimeVice currently, but I’m pulling almost all of my information from ANN and Wikipedia. Summaries will need to be reworded, sure, but all those stats and kanji names and static information like that? Copy, paste, baby. The site is still in its infancy, and I’m sure that eventually, it’ll start garnering information that ANN/Wikipedia’s collective encyclopedias won’t have, but there I pose the question again — why not just all that new information to one of the aforementioned sources to begin with? Why do we need this all new place for it? Why split up the contributing population more? (As a side note, I really hate how the AV’s encyclopedia is organized right now, but I’ll give it a few more weeks to develop and straighten out before passing final judgment.)