On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 9:59 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)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.