On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 03:40:27 -0400, "Gregory Maxwell" gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On the first part... I don't think the existence of articles is a problem. A more interesting subject is the escape of pop-culture content, often too trivial for the pop-culture articles into other pages.
Very true. I recently had a fairly bitter fight with Nintendo fans who insist outright that the Nintendo character King Bowser Koppa is far and away the most common use of the word bowser, so should live at the [[bowser]] page, based on a "consensus" of Nintendo fans in a discussion on the Nintendo article's Talk page. Since bowser is the Australian and NZ term for gas pump, and most dictionaries list it as a tanker vehicle, and both are based on the genericisation of the S. F Bowser Company's trademark, I strongly dispute their assertion, but that did not result in them citing any actual evidence. Anything not flattering to pop culture is "elitist" and probably biggoted (always spelt with two gs). Look at the discussion on [[British shorthair]] for example. Keeping the cruft confined to its own articles is a never-ending task, and one which I sometimes think is doomed to fail. At which point, in my view, the entire project will have failed; the world has no need of another place to collect things which can be found with the most elementary Google search. It's the ''other'' stuff which we need Wikipedia for: bringing to the public domain knowledge which is otherwise impenetrably buried in inaccessible treeware.
Guy (JzG)