It's not a simple matter of being in the eye of the beholder, or it being about a niche subject. Provided it's well sourced and those sources establish why the subject is notable, there should most certainly be an article about every soap opera that meets these standards.
What I'm referring to is the absolute proliferation about subjects that aren't necessarily notable in their own right, but are simply notable due to association. One cannot tell me that every episode of Lost or Family Guy is notable in and of itself. And yet (at least with Lost, I've never read Family Guy-related articles), we have an article on almost each and every episode, notable only by their connection to a notable show. Each episode doesn't necessarily have independent sources discussing the subjects.
Chosen at random from Lost, let's look at [[Exposé (Lost]]. I see two sources, one being an ABC-related site (and therefore not necessarily a reliable source, it's not a third party source), and IMDB, which is a great source of information, but hardly and establishment of notability, as they publish information on practically everything and everyone. Looking at the article itself, you have 6 sentences that are not directly related to describing the plot.
This model is repeated across every Lost episode, and countless other TV shows. However, this is not limited to only TV shows, but other subjects as well. It's *this* proliferation of absolute crap that I feel needs to be aggressively removed.
Chad H.
On Nov 21, 2007 7:57 PM, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Chad wrote:
Granted, we're not completed in some areas that we should be, but there is a very large signal-to-noise ratio in terms of articles. For every core article there are 10 frivolous ones.
What's "frivolous" is in the eye of the beholder. Take a look at our top 100 most heavily trafficked pages: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=enwiki&ns=articles&limit=100&month=11%2F2007&mode=view The non-pop-culture articles are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the list consists of articles about works of fiction, computer games, and entertainers. And also a bunch of articles about sex, of course, this being the internet. People _want_ to read about that stuff, they aren't winding up at those articles accidentally.
Wikipedia has a huge perceived signal-to-noise ratio because everybody has different ideas about what's "signal" and what's "noise." If everyone pruned out what they weren't interested in there'd be nothing at all left. Better to just ignore it.
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