Are the Stardew Valley wiki authors scientists?
Science is the generational project of finding out true things about the real world — and that project needs catalogers
There are people out there who — for reasons I'll never understand — have the unusual combination of patience and truly obsessive energy required to turn the wild wonders of the universe into reams of systematically annotated data.
They are the catalogers. You probably know one or two. The catalogers are the obsessive gamers who document every little detail of the farm simulation video game Stardew Valley, down to the last hidden secret. They are the rock collectors who buy bigger houses so they can convert a whole floor into a personal museum. They are your hyper-fans, your super-nerds, your mega-geeks. They are the people who somehow maintained the kind of sharp, ceaseless focus necessary to devote entire lifetimes to recording the precise positions of heavenly objects in the millennia before robotic astronomy.
To me, it is obvious that science needs catalogers — and that obsessively documenting video game lore or butterflies is, in a way, scientific. Even if done without scientific intent, detailed and systematic datasets are what make a lot of science possible.
But cataloging is not the kind of research that tends to get grant money. In fact, granting bodies like the European Research Council have a whole vocabulary built up to disqualify research that sounds too much like cataloging. Any scientist who's ever applied for a grant will know that suggesting a "fishing expedition" — let's just go see what we find and record it — is a good way to get a grant rejected.[1]
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