It seems unfortunate that the author took what could have been an interesting investigation of categorization and failed to break free of framing the story mostly in terms of a fight between cryptid enthusiasts and wikipedia editors over how real bigfoot is.
It’s especially frustrating because, at times, it touches on details that would be really useful in examining the categorization questions: take, for instance, some of the examples given for the ‘cryptid cull’: how does striking both thylacines and will-o’-the-wisps from the cryptids list; despite those two being non-cryptids in utterly different ways, not strike you as a more interesting phenomenon than jus totting them up as two in the list of those slain by the gatekeepers?
Thylacines presumably have a sliver of cryptid-cred in that I’m sure someone believes them to be less extinct than commonly suspected; but they fall off the list by virtue of being well inside the realm of mainstream biology and well supported by traditional scientiifc evidence; rather than because the evidence is so thin and low quality that they can’t even be retained in the fringe area of ‘cryptozoology’. Will-o’-the-wisps; on the other hand, have impeccable credentials as a folklore artifact; but have trouble making it as cryptids when even their enthusiasts often don’t have an animal in mind(rather than various optical oddities, bioluminescence, etc.) as an explanation for the various reports. Then you’ve got jackalopes: also impeccable folklore stuff, since you’ve got a weird little taxidermy niche, some local culture and tourism angles, and so on; but vanishingly thin evidence that the popularity of a particular piece of novelty taxidermy implies a novel animal rather than two well known ones getting bodged together.
Then the piece even explicitly mentions categorization as a search-space limiting phenomenon(but as though this is somehow sinister or unexpected, rather than being a fundamental feature of categorization: inclusion and exclusion toward coherence); but wanders off into some hand-wringing about people who are lazy about their training sets rather than taking that point up.
Then there’s even a ‘conclusion’ where the author specifically notes that there are a lot of interesting folklore bits around various cryptids(the python festival, east coast/west coast bigfoot feuds) that go undocumented; and proceeds to blame ‘the aforementioned gatekeeping’ rather than, say, examine the possibility that pressure against classifying cryptids as ‘folklore’ in an effort to make them more science-y might be inhibiting the compilation of folklore material; where they classified as folklore artifacts.
It’s frustrating because the problems of building ontologies that are useful is much deeper and more interesting than just treating them as a cultural shoving match decided purely by power(especially if you can’t at least do that with the playful provocativeness that some of the better postmodern deconstructionist types brought to the task); but this one seems to have missed that particular forest even as it bumped into a number of trees.
