[WikiEN-l] fancruft

[Stan Shebs]

Michael Hopcroft wrote:

>You know, I haven't really seen a good working definition of the term 
>"fancruft", yet I seem to have run afoul of the concept more often than 
>I have failed to.
>
I would think of it in terms of how much thought and effort went
into the connection.

If a movie is a retelling of a historical event, then it's something
that hundreds of people worked to create, and it affected the thousands
who watched it, so the existence of the movie is significant enough
to be worth noting on the historical event's page.

But if the event is only suggested in a offhand joke in a TV show,
it was probably the result of a total of five minutes work by one
scriptwriter, and only a tiny number of viewers, aka the "fans",
would even notice the reference at all, so it's insignificant.

Another way to look at it is that WP is a condensed summarization
("compendium"). So if you had a 700-page scholarly work on the
Simpsons that, as part of its thoroughness, explained every joke
and allusion in every show, and condensed it down to 70 pages of
WP articles, what would you choose to keep? Probably not every
one of the random allusions.

Stan