Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Oct 21, 2006, at 10:38 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
I'll save you the problem of embarassing yourself with an elaboration. An encyclopedia that doesn't suck recognizes that different people have different ideas about what is important, and respects them for that. What could be more self-evident than that.
It may be that my point has gotten lost amongst the rhetoric here. Personally, I'd vote to keep any article on a costumed character in Marvel or DC with appearances in multiple issues. The problems are not in terms of what is important.
The problem is... well, let's pull up a solid midlist Marvel character - Speedball. 1603 word article. Only 500 words of that pertain to the real world instead of the fictional world of the comics. That's the problem. Fancruft is in many ways a poor choice of terms for this. Especially since it's not even necessarily the case that the information itself is the problem. The problem is that virtually the entire article was written so as to pertain to the Marvel Universe, with occasional citations of issue number.
It's not a problem unique to any area, either. I'll wager that any fictional text that has spawned articles about its individual characters has at least one article like this. (Oddly, the exception to this seems to be Pokemon, where all of the articles I've glanced at [Admittedly just a sample] take an out-of-universe perspective.)
And Doctor Who. Don't ever forget that our Doctor Who articles are amongst the best for their real-world perspective, eg. [[Dalek]].