Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/10/06, Jesse W jessw@netwood.net wrote:
You would not see that in the Encyclopedia of Late 20th Century American Television? Really? Or do you mean in any "general" encyclopedia. Because certainly, Wikipedia reaches the level of a specialized encyclopedia in a number of areas, like television shows - but (I hope), we don't go too much beyond that.
I still find it hard to imagine a specialised encyclopaedia listing all the couch gags in Simpsons episodes, or detailed plot summaries with "quotes" for every episode of Futurama or "Clerks: The Animated Series" etc etc. If someone can prove me wrong, go for it.
Steve
That's my beef with a lot of our pop culture articles, TBH. The quotes section should go to Wikiquote. If any quotes (I imagine Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" would be a good example) are notable enough to be in an encyclopaedia, we should have some commentary on them and their impact. Plot summaries aren't that bad - at least they're prose. The worst ones, IMO, are pop culture references sections (last time I checked, [[Alan Turing]] is a good example of this) which don't add anything meaningful to the article and act as a magnet for info that most people won't care about at all (relativists who suggest that this is none of our business ought to note that we're an encyclopaedia - when we collect information, we ought to comment on it), and also trivia sections which serve the same purpose on pop culture articles (look at the article on [[House, M.D.]] before I trimmed the trivia section).
John