Vee schrieb:
I don't really mind people writing about what they are interested in - their favourite band/soap opera/movie/whatever - but "x in popular culture" sections/articles really do need to go.
Stan Shebs schrieb:
There are 99 fans for every professional (note the two sets are not disjoint), so it shouldn't be too surprising that the disproportion is reflected in WP. If we continue with our practice of quietly pruning down (usually unsourced) "fan" content, while leaving the (usually sourced) "intellectual" content, over time the intellectual content will be greater and greater.
Stan
Of course everyone writes about what they're interested in, and that's a good thing, it's the natural thing. The difference is where fan enthusiasm outweighs professional enthusiasm.
The funny thing is that there is a strong trendency to turn "x in pop culture" sections into articles, and to decry anyone who disagrees as being deletionist (which I'm clearly not, btw).
Stan, in theory, you're right. In practice, I see a tendency to the opposite. Take a look at the SA link, in case you don't know it yet. It's an old story, but the examples of article pairs, although many of them are chosen tongue-in-cheek, speak for themselves.
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wikigroaning.php
But the problems of fan-writing go much deeper.
On many sportspersons' articles, there's an unreferenced statement "the greatest X-player of all time". Remove the statement, and a fan is going to revert you. Over and over.
Or try appropriately tagging some Star Wars Expanded Universe articles as {{in-universe}} and {{primarysources}}. Chances are, the crowd is going to remove them sooner or later. Better yet, try and nominate a bunch of the worst for deletion, and you will be shouted down as a deletionist.
Or, to give a more subtle example, I recently changed the sentence "Neil Armstrong was the first man to have set foot on an extraterrestrial world" to "[...] on the moon". http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neil_Armstrong&diff=prev&o...
Also, there are too many users primarily interested in social networking, with signature collections and all. Btw: Mr. Wales, if you are reading this, there are some users you could make very happy by signing their pages. Really.
But what makes me pessimistic (at least right now) is that while Wikipedia already has an increasing anti-intellectual systemic bias already, as more and more Web2.0 spoiled users arrive and others quit, there are still complaints about too much elitism. Wikipedia should be much less democratic than it currently is. Seriously, democracy is a purely idealistic concept. No state in the world ever was or ever will be truly democratic. Some dimwits on certain websites keep complaining about how Jimbo is "God King". I wish he and others would actually take on that responsibility, because it's necessary. Self-governing on a project as large as Wikipedia is ludricous period.
To abuse the words of Tom Lehrer: "The reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people."
Wow. Sorry for that rant. I fell bitter already. I mean better.
-Adrian