On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 9:59 PM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Jul 11, 2008, at 1:01 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
Sure, but few of them try to cover a general topic from a non in-universe POV, like [[flying car (fiction)]]; I think the point would be that you would be able to manage the articles better, because you could enforce standards. Right now it's all intermingled fact and fiction in articles, I think that that's a bad thing for both parts of the articles.
Please point me to an article with intermingled fact and fiction.
It's pretty common for articles to lapse into "in-universe" language. In many many the only thing letting you know the entire article is fictional material is a single sentence in the lead. Sometimes this sentence is more obvious than others. (And I think the existence of that sentence is only as common as it is due to some rather ruthless deletions by folks paroling new pages)
For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyriandiol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nennifer
I'm probably not alone in finding a degree of distastefulness in an article who's only reference to non reality is a single mention in the lead. You don't want to qualify every sentence with "this is fiction", but there should be a balance. I worry about the encyclopedic merit of articles with such a small amount of meta-analysis that they don't naturally indicate the fictional nature of the subject fairly often.
Another form of intermixing is the occasional "in popular culture" trivia item which fails to mention its fictional nature, but these are so easily fixed I couldn't find an example quickly.