On 2/17/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
The question of whether "in popular culture" or "trivia" sections should be included in articles has been raised many times, and I don't want to hash over the whole debate again (My version of the discussions is something like: "Are they encyclopedic?" "Maybe not, but it's the only way some people can contribute. Also, it makes us more hip and up to date than EB." "Well, I think they are crap." "Well, we agree to disagree.").
You start here talking about "in popular culture" *sections* but drift onto whole articles. IMHO, "X in popular culture" articles are fine, but what I hate seeing is well written and researched articles poluted by a bunch of "In Simpsons episode Y, Homer says "I'd like to eat an X"" type garbage.
I suspect the solution is to try and surreptitiously isolate these types of semi-welcome contributions. People get upset when their contributions are rejected. Instead, by quietly pushing them into a "X in popular culture" article, we can leave it up to reusers of Wikipedia material whether they want to take all these articles or not.
A similar problem exists in ever-growing lists. Take [[number sign]] as an example. Once, it probably had a concise list of terms that are used around the world, and was a useful reference for technical writers (such as myself - I was looking for a less culturally biased term than "hash" or "pound sign"). Since then it has been polluted by unsourced additions like "splat", "widget mark" and even, I quote, "Ken Moody, lecturer at the University of Cambridge, used to call it "chickenscratch"".
If anyone has any great ideas for how to deal with these situations, I'd like to hear them. The solution basically has to somehow effectively discourage future editors from adding their own favourite term, without slapping a rule in their face.
Cleaning out lists like this isn't even useful. Many people will probably just look at it and go "oh my god, they don't even have widget mark!!"
Steve