Bryan Derksen wrote:
Anthony wrote:
There are a number of reasons to do this. One is that it helps lessen the amount of "fancruft".
First it behooves to demonstrate what's actually wrong with "fancruft" before trying to come up with arbitrary limitations intended to reduce it.
For quite a while now I've been using Wikipedia first before IMDB when I want to know whether a movie or TV show is worth watching, a synopsis is rather important in that regard.
As anyone who's been in a college literature course can tell you, there are many important things to ask about any work of art that go well beyond what happened in it and who was involved in tis creation. "why is this important?" "why do people talk about it, and what about it do they discuss?" "what does it mean, both intrinsically and in the context of the times and situation in which it was created?" "what reasons do those who dislike or dismiss it have for doing so, and how valid are those reasons today?" "has the way the work has been percieved changed signficantly between the time in which it was created and now?" The same can be said in many respects for the creators of a work; "Why was Shakespeare?" and "Why does Shakespeare matter?" are even more vital questions for a scholar (and encyclopedia writing is an essentially scholarly exercise) as "Who was Shakespeare?"
There are many things that would be readily accepted in an article about Macbeth that would dismissed as "fancruft" in an article about The Sopranos -- but there is no fundamental difference between the purpose of those two articles. None at all. "Why does The Sopranos matter?" is just as important a question as "Why does Macbeth matter?", just as "Why is The Sopranos the way it is?" is just as important a question as "Why did Shakespeare write macbeth the way he did?". Just because a work is newer, is less mainstream, or is more poorly regarded in the mainstream does not make it any less worthy of this sort of examination. Sometimes quite the contrary, at times: if one is writing an article on Plan Nine from Outer Space, the low-budget science-fiction film of legendary shoddy awfulness, it is important to provide some reason WHY it is worth talking about -- as an example of delusional hubris on the part of the idiot auteur Ed Wood, or perhaps as an example of the perseverance and improvisation that enabled Wood to complete the film in the face of innumerable obstacles like the death of his only remotely qualified actor.
Meanwhile, many wikipedia writers seem to be letting relatively minor things occupy more of their attention -- not because those things should not be included, but because they stop with them and do not go any further. I find this most common the biographies of actors, particularly LGBT actors. The last time I checked the article on Raymond Burr, one of the most significant actors in early American television, the only point mentioned other than a bare stub was his homosexuality -- a fact that, while worth noting, is utterly irrelevant to his legacy or, for that matter, to what made raymiond Burr a significant figure. Although if you want to examine the life of Raymond Burr his sexuality would matter, the article must still answer the question "Why is Raymond Burr important? What did he do and what did it mean? How is the world different than it would have been had Raymond Burr not existed?"
To partly answer that question: Burr matters because he was one of the first true "TV stars", because he had a knack for combining gravity with subtle humor which brought to vivid life one of the seminal characters of the medium of television, and his charisma enabled him to trancend the mold of the "leading man" stereotype of the era -- helping prove in the process that the new and not-well-respected medium WAS worthy of the attentions of a serious actor. In short, if you want to understand the way mass media developed in the United States, Raymond Burr is VERY important. Yet only his sexuality was considered important by whoever did his wikipedia article (unless it has been edited further since I I read it).
When writing a pop-culture article, even a stub I wish would be completed by others, I have made a practice of showing, as best I could, exactly what about my topic is significant. Because anyone who approaches editing cultural Wikipedia with any degree of serious should realize that they ARE scholars -- even if they're scholars of the Collected works of CLAMP rather than The Collected Works of George Orwell.