Talk:Beholder (Dungeons & Dragons)
No, Meeler, your latest version is extremely awkward, what with the "e.g." and the parentheses. You seem to be allergic to the word "fictional", relying on it to be implied from "D&D", "fantasy", etc. But as I pointed out, D&D creatures comprise real, fictional (made up by Gary Gygax & thousands of others) and mythological (made up long before D&D) creatures. Wikipedia exists not for us to demonstrate out knowledge of the arcane, but to inform readers who don't have that knowledge. As such, it's burden some on them to expect them to figure our what an article implies.
Try this thought experiment: imagine you're a Chinese person who is browsing Wikipedia as an adjunct to the beginning English course you're taking. Being a rural Chinese, you've never heard of D&D, and being a beginner at English, your grasp of the word "fantasy" is somewhat overly: you've mostly heard it in the context of psychology (Fantasy (psychology)) because that's the literal translation of certain denunciations of the West you've encountered from the Chinese Communist Party. Now, a close reading of the Beholder article might still cause you to conclude that the beholder doesn't really exist; but we also want to accommodate readers who only have time to glance at the page. As for instance, the poor Chinese fellow whose English class assignment is to write an essay, in English, on bizarre animals of the world.
Now of course this is a contrived example, but it will also apply to a twelve-year old home schooled Pentecostal girl whose never been allowed to play D&D, or a kid from the Atlanta housing projects whose never seen other than domestic animals, and thinks that perhaps along with bear and badger, beholders really do lurk in the woods of Appalachia.
Don't rely on your readers to figure out what you mean; don't assume they hail from the same background or possess the same knowledge you do; if they did, they wouldn't need to be reading your Wikipedia entry. The article is for them, not for your ratification. Spell out what you mean. -- orthogonal 13:40, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)