Imp-Chan wrote:
Alexa is quite probably the worst possible way to judge cultural relevancy ever. We have better traffic than quite a few higher-ranked Alexa sites, I guarantee it, the reason we show as lower is because many of our readers don't use the things that would register with Alexa. Additionally, we update only three times a week, so a comic that updates more often would have higher traffic without necessarily having a larger audience.
Don't take it as an attack Impy, I'm saying webcomics in general almost always do not deserve their own entry. ES wouldn't be any more relevant if it were rated 40 or 20 thousand; that's where CAD is and I sure as fuck don't think CAD would deserve an entry in a normal encyclopaedia.
Imp-Chan wrote:
I think encyclopaedias are limited only partially on relevance... largely it has traditionally been a matter of budget for space in the book as much as it has been a matter of anything else.
Um, I dunno about that. I have a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica upstairs and it takes up it's own bookcase; 33 volumes each clocking it at a thousand pages. I don't think they were really worried about how much bookspace articles took up, and were rather enforcing their own notability guidelines.
Imp-Chan wrote:
Additionally, webcomics in general are certainly culturally relevant. They're having an enormous impact on the artist's business model, for one thing, and an equally enormous impact on concepts in art for another. They're affecting the publishing models as well. As a webcomic, Errant Story is superlatively well-written and quite well-drawn, and Poe's work has served as an inspiration to many better-known artists on the web. I think that there can be no question of his cultural relvance. The problem is that the wikipedia admins aren't looking for relevance, they're looking for significance.
^-^'
The webcomic movement certainly does deserve an entry, for the reasons you listed. However, to enumerate each example seems unnecessary. At most, ES should be a footnote to a more in depth article on webcomics in general, maybe as an example of American manga style works.
Again, I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, but it's quite easy for me to see it from their point of view.