Kathryn Cramer has enormous street cred in science fiction; she's a writer, an editor on numerous anthologies, and a crossover presence on the Web whose Googlemap mashup made the cover of Nature, so she's no printhead whiner when it comes to Wikipedia. But she does have a bone to pick:

"After a brief experience with Wikipdia, its editors strike me as a pack of officious trolls whose main concern is to make sure that you don't actually know the people you are writing about. The science fiction field doesn't work that way. I know hundreds (maybe over a thousand) science fiction writers, editors, and fans. Many, many of them could be described as my "associates." Am I connected to most members of the professional science fiction community in some way? You bet." — via Kathryn Cramer.com

And she's got a point. Let's take a concrete example, an icon of the sf field, Damon Knight. A driving force in the Golden Age of science fiction, author, editor, founder of SFWA and Clarion, I mean, you just can't overestimate his impact on the field. Here's what he gets in Wikipedia.

What's not there is precisely the kind of insight offered by people who knew Damon. Now the Wikipedia biography guidelines are there for generally good reasons — not everybody [who has a bunch of friends who get hammered on a Saturday night and post a bio] deserves to get one. And Cramer's suggestion, to move the "real" biographies to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database makes sense from the perspective of the field, but it still makes me a bit sad to see such attenuated summaries in Wikipedia.

These are the people whose vision created the world we live in, and, as Cramer persuasively argues, their connectedness to sf fandom is inextricable from their bio. That's one of the things that makes the sf community different than, say, mainstream lit. I know the practical answer is to leave the stubs and link to ISFDB, but that seems to risk of perpetuating the kind of siloed knowledge that Wikis were meant to kill. If only Ted Nelson's "transclusion" were more than just crappy iframes and the dream of XML...