[WikiEN-l] Comic book articles and fancruft (was: Pattern copyvios involving...)

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

Phil Sandifer wrote:
> On Oct 21, 2006, at 10:38 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> 
>> I'll save you the problem of embarassing yourself with an elaboration.
>> An encyclopedia that doesn't suck recognizes that different people  
>> have
>> different ideas about what is important, and respects them for that.
>> What could be more self-evident than that.
> 
> It may be that my point has gotten lost amongst the rhetoric here.  
> Personally, I'd vote to keep any article on a costumed character in  
> Marvel or DC with appearances in multiple issues. The problems are  
> not in terms of what is important.
> 
> The problem is... well, let's pull up a solid midlist Marvel  
> character - Speedball. 1603 word article. Only 500 words of that  
> pertain to the real world instead of the fictional world of the  
> comics. That's the problem. Fancruft is in many ways a poor choice of  
> terms for this. Especially since it's not even necessarily the case  
> that the information itself is the problem. The problem is that  
> virtually the entire article was written so as to pertain to the  
> Marvel Universe, with occasional citations of issue number.
> 
> It's not a problem unique to any area, either. I'll wager that any  
> fictional text that has spawned articles about its individual  
> characters has at least one article like this. (Oddly, the exception  
> to this seems to be Pokemon, where all of the articles I've glanced  
> at [Admittedly just a sample] take an out-of-universe perspective.)
> 

And Doctor Who. Don't ever forget that our Doctor Who articles are
amongst the best for their real-world perspective, eg. [[Dalek]].

-- 
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