i can edit on wikipedia =)

I HAVE THE POWA

Wikipedia cannot be willy-nilly edited to change it to whatever you desire... I always find it baffling how people are quick to throw out Wikipedia because it can be "edited". - It's more of a strength than a weakness, it means the information typically is always the most up to date.

And to make significant alterations you do need a thing called a "citation". Aka. Evidence to backup a claim... And often your evidence will get rebuked if a better piece of evidence gets presented.
Otherwise your alterations can and will be reverted or changed to something else.

Now wikipedia in this instance isn't providing a citation for it's assertion that it's an 8th gen console, but they do state that because the Switch's primary competitors are 8th gen consoles, that it's an 8th gen console.

This general consensus (which is blatantly wrong) is used as justification for the currently wrong consensus that Switch is eighth gen. "It has happened before that a console manufacturer has had two consoles in the same generation." Except it didn't. History was revised because the general consensus is arrived at by the gaming community, and the gaming community plays console wars. A generation without a winner doesn't fit the big picture and the actual third generation didn't have any winner. So the fourth generation NES became third generation while the third generation became a footnote of the second generation.

Other reasons for labeling Switch as eighth generation were based on mainly two big assumptions:

1. Switch is a Nintendo console, therefore it will have a short lifecycle, approximately replaced in 2021.
2. PS and Xbox consoles have much longer lifecycles, so the PS5 and Xbox 4 shouldn't be expected before 2021.

Put these two together and you run the risk of misalignment of generations, because the Switch successor would be 10th gen if Switch is gen 9 while the PS5 and Xbox 4 would be 9th gen. The generational model devised by the gaming community would be off by a full generation, so Switch had to be gen 8 to prevent that from happening. That's how it got put on Wikipedia that way. For those who don't know (apparently there are quite a few people here), Wikipedia is a user-generated website, so just about anyone can upload and edit articles.

But in the year 2020 it should be clear that both assumptions above were terribly wrong (expected, because the length of lifecycle theories were wrong to begin with). There's no risk of misalignment of generations anymore. Launches of consoles that belong into the same gen being spread out over three years is nothing odd in video game history, and with generations getting longer nowadays, Switch falls well within the acceptable range anyway.

One constant oddity in the generational debate has been the Dreamcast's classification as gen 6. Those who insist that Switch is gen 8 should also consider the Dreamcast gen 5, because pretty much everything they throw at Switch applies to the Dreamcast in more severe form. But over the course of the last three years, I've not seen a single guy who would put the Dreamcast into gen 5.

In any case, as time passes, things will get more interesting. If Switch continues to be put into gen 8, then Nintendo will eventually be the first company to undo a ~60m headstart of a competitor and Sony will be the shameful company who pissed away such a huge headstart. In that case, history will remember the PS4 as a loser.

Which brings us back to the point that the curators of Wikipedia itself having the ability to be misinformed, just as anyone else.  The problem also lies with their logic.  If Switch is out another 3-4 years (which is VERY likely), then it would have competed against the PS5 and XSX for just as much time.  The bigger difference is that the WiiU was Nintendo's gen 8 console, so it would make more sense to group Switch within gen 9 under those conditions.  It just means Nintendo launched theirs 3 years before Sony or MS did.

So let me ask you this, would you consider the WiiU a gen 7 console for 1 year of its life, and a gen 8 console for 3.5 years of its life?  The concept is the same as it competed against the PS3 and 360 for that first year, but with the Switch's longer life cycle it would just be spread across a shorter range of time by comparison.

I mean if you really wanna break it up like that, I guess you could.  But it makes the concept of number generations even more convoluted than they already are.

The best use of Wikipedia usually aren`t the article but the sources you can check.

Now wikipedia in this instance isn't providing a citation for it's assertion that it's an 8th gen console, but they do state that because the Switch's primary competitors are 8th gen consoles, that it's an 8th gen console.

I regard the WiiU as a 7th gen console due to it's technical underpinnings and game library.

I regard the Switch as an 8th gen console due to it's technical underpinnings and game library.

Whatever else is irrelevant to me.

Precisely. It's the evidence that is used to build the wikipedia articles.